Shadow Play
by The Phiend
Summary: The Titans, patrolling Jump City on Halloween night. What could possibly go wrong?
1. Chapter 1

_(Author's note: Well, I had hoped to get this _finished _by __Halloween, but unfortunately life had drastically different ideas about where my mental focus was going to go. Note to relatives: QUIT DYING. Anyway, even though the intended date is past I'm not at all compelled to abandon it, so let's see how quickly this goes._

_And no, I'm not abandoning Titan Knight either. When the idea for this came to me with some slight prodding by Cylor, I started writing it; and the way things have been going lately, being able to do any sort of creative writing is an improvement._

_And I still don't own the Teen Titans, to the best of my knowledge.)_

* * *

A green sparrow flitted through the night sky above Jump City, searching for a vantage point. It eventually settled on top of an old apartment building, across the street from one of the city's more popular parks.

The bird turned into Beast Boy, instinctively adjusting his posture to maintain his balance during the transformation. Taking in a deep breath of the cool night air, he grinned to himself. Halloween was one of his favorite holidays, and this year it came with great night scenery. The full moon bathed the city in its cold light, and a light fog was just beginning to creep in from the bay. While little more than a thin mist, it added a cool bite to the autumn breeze that gave an eerie waver to the branches of the trees in the park. The end result could hardly be called chilly, as this was still California, but it still made a nice contrast to the heat rising from the crowded streets.

Streets crowded with a steady stream of mythical beasts, aliens, undead ghouls and other monstrosities; which would be a cause for alarm on any other night of the year. This night, though, all were simply middle-schoolers out to draw attention to themselves, whether for candy or for attention's own sake. But despite the costumes calling up thoughts of nameless horrors, dire forces from beyond the grave and other neat things like that; the laughter, music and cheers that reached his ears told him the city was never more alive.

Still, he'd been on patrol for hours, and the nagging sensation that he was missing a movie marathon was pushing him to his limits. With a yawn, he pulled out his communicator. "Ten o'clock and all's well," he drowsily muttered. "Can we go home _now_? Halloween fever's _gotta_ be fading out."

"How's the foot traffic looking?" came Robin's voice over the communicator.

Beast Boy blinked a couple times, then focused his eyes on the occupants of the streets. A few clusters of trick-or-treaters were all he could see. Kids around his own age, wearing costumes of ghosts, skeletons, various other monsters, Robin, Cyborg, Starfire, Raven....

Trick-or-treating had always been a subject of fascination for him. First, there was free candy. Second, there was just something fun about dressing up as things he couldn't just transform into. Kind of like being a superspy, disguising his disguising. And then there was free candy. It was one of very few days when you were _supposed_ to act all crazy. And then there was free candy. Why, it seemed like just yesterday that he considered using multiple costumes to pick up tons of extra candy.

Wait. That _was_ yesterday. And before he had found out about the movie marathon that was going on...at that very moment.

"Just a few kids," Beast Boy muttered in answer to Robin's question. "I bet the rest of them went home, like _we_ should be doing. And how come none of these kids have costumes of _me_? And..._why do they look cooler than me_?"

"Focus, Beast Boy. If the rest of the city is this slow, we might be able to get out of here early. The police aren't going to need the extra help if that's the case."

"Wait, something going on," Beast Boy said. He craned his neck to get a better look at the source of the sudden motion he had caught.

A small pack of trick-or-treaters had been crossing the street, but for whatever reason the taller kid in the front had stopped in the middle of the road, and the followers had stumbled into him. As an argument unfolded, Beast Boy realized their costumes looked very familiar, and almost laughed at the irony.

"Oh," he said dismissively, "It's just some kid in one of your costumes talking smack to some kid in a Slade costume." He'd need to try something of the sort for April Fool's day...or sooner. "Wait. How come people get _Slade_ costumes but not _mine_?"

Robin's sigh came in loud and clear. "I wish I knew."

"Hold on." He'd just seen the miniature Slade, the one who'd stopped in the middle of the street, backhand the miniature Robin, sending him sprawling to the pavement. Even more unusual than the act itself, was the _way_ in which the kid had moved. It was almost unnatural. There was no warning, no tensing of muscles prior the blow. Simply a swing. And even now, as the other kids recoiled in alarm, his posture was disturbing. His arms were hanging off his shoulders, stiff and limp, causing his candy collection to fall unceremoniously to the ground. "That's not right," he concluded as he prepared to leap down and intervene in...whatever it was.

"What's not right?" Robin asked over the communicator.

Right as he was about to leap down and put a stop to the fight, he felt something constricting his leg.

He didn't have time to wonder what it was.

"AAAAAAAA!"

With a sudden pull and a slight rustle of leaves, Beast Boy was slammed to the ground, unconscious.

"Beast Boy!" Robin yelled over the still functioning communicator on the ground. "Beast Boy, report! Beast...Wait, what is--"

The muffled sounds of Robin's struggle quickly went silent.


	2. Chapter 2

"Wow!" The small pack of youngsters looked up at Cyborg with starry eyes. "That's so awesome!"

Cyborg chuckled. "Sure was. But you gotta remember that it was the _whole_ team there. I couldn't have fried those flying robots without Robin and Raven turning off their shields, or Starfire and Beast Boy blowing up the factory's guns. Just 'cause _I_ had the big part doesn't mean it was a solo thing."

"Whoa," the kids uttered in unison. Which Cyborg thought was undeserving for the comment he'd made, but he also knew that sometimes, kids were just that easily fascinated. And he wasn't about to burst their bubble, certainly not on Halloween night.

One of the shorter kids, wearing a little skeleton costume, had a question. "Mr. Cyborg, do you like Halloween?"

Cyborg smiled. "Of course! There's all the decorations, all the costumes, all the parties...I admit I'm not into candy too much these days, but on the other hand I never have to worry about _my_ costume anymore."

"But....don't you think some parts of it are scary...like ghosts, monsters and witches?"

Another kid, in a devil costume, scoffed. "He fights _real_ monsters every day, stupid!"

"Whoa!" Cyborg said over the top of them. "Don't need to be like that. And yeah, some parts of Halloween _are _scary. But you know what? It's OK to be scared. In fact, I'll let y'all in on a little secret: Even brave people get scared, sometimes."

An internal alarm got Cyborg's attention, and prompted him to check the time on his arm display. "Ten o'clock. Well kids, I'd love to hang with ya some more, but I think you'd better go find some more candy before it's all gone, you know what I'm sayin'?"

The kids obligingly started to walk off, back on the candy trail. Cyborg heard that same kid in the devil costume shortly thereafter: "Easy for _him_ to say, he _lives_ with a witch. And a werewolf!"

"_They're_ only scary if you're a _bad guy_!" Cyborg hollered after them with a smirk. He sighed and shook his head. "Hard to say if Beast Boy's ever _really_ scary, honestly," he said to himself once the kids were out of sight. "Smelly, sure, but scary?"

Cyborg paused to look around, again. The two dark shapes of highrise buildings in the distance showed that he was on the frontier of the urban section of town. And that he had managed to meander a fair distance away from the T-Car over the past three hours. Nothing alarming about that, though, it'd just take a ten-minute walk back.

Seeing a lack of kids near the intersection, Cyborg decided to alleviate his boredom by walking across the street to chat up the solitary policeman there.

"Nice night," Cyborg said.

"It'd be nicer if we didn't have to be in uniform...so to speak," replied the middle-aged man.

"I hear that. Any idea why we _are_ here?"

"No idea, just that the commissioner said to take this seriously. Some of the guys said he encountered an ordeal on Halloween as a street cop somewhere back east."

"Huh. Well, as long as we ain't havin' another ordeal, I guess we're doing pretty good."

"I hear _that_," he agreed with a smirk.

Cyborg sighed, taking in the sounds for a few seconds. The nearby streets were sparse in population, but the loud noises of a myriad parties out of view played at the edges of his hearing, like a dull roar. Dull enough that he hadn't paid it any mind, but on the other hand it was comforting to know the city was still celebratory.

The policeman cleared his throat. "So what was that you were telling those kids about candy?"

Cyborg shuddered. "Evil candy. Long story involving a remote and teeth. It sure tastes good, but it does a number on your stomach. Or more like a whole _series _of numbers."

A soft series of regular footsteps drew Cyborg's ear, and his eyes soon followed. A different set of costumed little kids was coming down the sidewalk, towards them. Cyborg stepped forward to greet them.

"Hi there! Y'all having a great Halloween?"

The closest trick-or-treater, about four feet tall and sporting a pirate costume, broke from the group and walked right up to Cyborg. The kid lifted his right arm behind his back, to Cyborg's confusion.

His confusion was only magnified when he was struck in the torso by the kid's arm, which somehow had enough force to knock him over.

"Yo!" Cyborg protested as he got to his feet and his mind started piecing together inconsistencies. "What's the—why did—how did...." It was then that he noticed all the eyes he could see were glowing a light blue. "Uh-oh. Zombie kids?" It was as good an explanation as any.

The kids advanced at their walking pace, the one who had struck Cyborg waiting for a couple seconds while his group caught up. Cyborg, unwilling to reduce a mind-control-victim-kid to a bloody pulp, backed up at the same pace while trying to formulate a more acceptable plan. As this continued, other clusters of kids appeared walking down the street behind the first group, all stepping in unison.

A couple seconds later, he heard a metal clink, followed by a cloud of white smoke issuing from a canister that had suddenly appeared on the ground, blocking all the kids from view.

A new, female voice hollered, "Carl! This way!"

Cyborg's name certainly wasn't Carl, but it was as good a direction as any. He turned and ran, keeping up with the policeman and following the policewoman in front of them.

* * *

"Whoa," Cyborg commented with some fascination, "wagon train of the 21st century."

The ring of twelve police cars in the center of the otherwise empty mall parking lot certainly had more than a passing resemblance to the wagon trains of old. As Cyborg approached the makeshift fortification with the two police officers, he became aware of the twenty or so other police officers in the cars and in the central area between them all. As well as the handful of kids who were also in the central area.

"Umm...you guys got any idea what's goin' on?" Cyborg asked.

The policewoman who had led him here answered. "Got some reports about kids going crazy at several spots across town, before all our radios cut out. This was the best spot to regroup. Haskins led these kids here," indicating the central group with a nod of her head.

"Radios cut out, huh?" Cyborg directed a signal analysis process to the display on his arm, and examined it. "Yeah, somethin's throwing out a lot of EM noise. Seems clearer on the higher frequencies though." He routed his built-in communicator to his arm. "Robin, come in, do you read me? Robin?"

No answer.

"Raven."

No answer.

"Starfire."

No answer.

"Beast Boy?"

No answer.

Cyborg growled in frustration. "Well _this_ is great."

He almost didn't hear the little boy. "Mr. Cyborg?" The voice gave it away as the same kid from before. Which _did_ make sense, Cyborg realized, as that set of trick-treaters _was_ the last he'd seen before all this started. "Are you scared?"

Cyborg sighed. "Sure am. But I ain't givin' up, if that's what you're askin'."

"So where's _your_ car?" the snotty kid from the same group demanded.

"It's around here," Cyborg said with a slight degree of annoyance, "It's just—AHA!"

Cyborg began busily interacting with his arm display and controls. "OK, I can contact the T-Car...and the T-Car's transceiver can reach the Tower through the interference! Sweet! ...except the Tower can't reach any of the others either. Weird." Cyborg's eyebrow furled in suspicion. "It can't even get a one-way signal out to _me_. Must be some interference near the Tower itself...."

"Mr. Cyborg," the first kid forced himself to ask, "did you really figure all that out just _now_?"

"Sure did. You never know _where_ you're gonna find answers, huh?"

"Guess not...."

Cyborg smiled, before turning to address the police with a straight face. "Guess that's our only lead," he declared. "We track down the trouble at the Tower, get to the bottom of this."

"Alright, you go ahead," Carl said. "We'll keep this area secure."

Cyborg cast a skeptical eye. "And if you can't?"

"Then we toss the kids in the cars and drive off. Better odds for us than anything head-on."

Cyborg sighed. "Guess I'm on my own, then."

"But Mr. Cyborg," the kid cut in with some panic, "you can't leave us here by ourselves!"

Cyborg smiled in return. "It's alright. You're in good hands with the police, you don't need _me_ here too. Besides, I gotta go out and there stop whatever's doing this, which means I gotta...go out there and find it. So...I gotta go out there and save the day, looks like!"

As started off in the direction of the T-Car, he was talking to himself. "'Sides, I just gotta stay away from a bunch of little kids. How hard could it be?"

frequencies


	3. Chapter 3

Cyborg was quickly discovering how hard it could be.

It seemed a lot easier when he assumed the zombie kids would stay in their little packs. Instead, he discovered they were fanning out individually, which made matters more difficult. More difficult to spot, and more numbers to keep track of.

The sounds of Halloween had died down, and in the virtually absolute silence every single creak of his movement sounded like a cacophony to his enhanced hearing. The light of the full moon bathing the city highlighted his reflective surfaces. The wooden buildings he found himself surrounded by limited his field of vision. His skill with stealth was subpar. And he was still stuck with the task of getting to the bottom of this mystery without any backup.

He'd chosen the T-Car as his immediate destination because attempting to _walk_ the length of the city was never recommended, even less so with hazardous city-wide conditions in effect. The tactical necessity did nothing to ease his nerves.

At the corner of a house, with its edge to his left, he peered across the street, to the next house. No movement. He looked to the right, down the street he'd need to cross. No movement he could detect. He deployed his "finger-cam" and gripped the corner, using the camera to check that direction without needing to break his concealment. No movement he could detect here, either.

After taking a deep breath, he stealthily ran across the street. Or so he tried to convince himself, as the accelerated footfalls echoed far louder in his mind than they did in his ears. Each step he nervously glanced in some direction, completely expecting to be discovered at any time. He took another deep breath when he finally made it to the shadow of the next building.

That was the thirty-seventh time he'd performed that dash procedure. He was nearing an isolated industrial park, the same one he'd parked the T-Car in. He was fairly relieved at the visible sign of progress, as he was almost beginning to wonder if he was actually getting anywhere.

He sidestepped along the length of the new building, making a special effort to duck behind the huge jack-o-lantern. To keep from dwelling on fear, he was mentally running through options for the next set of movement as he went. The buildings in the industrial park were taller and wider than the ones he was stepping through, which would normally complicate his current travel procedure; however a number of them also had short walls surrounding them, which could significantly reduce the chance of detection.

As he was in the midst of consideration, the sudden sound of rustling leaves reached his ears from behind.

He whipped his head towards the direction of the sound, and armed his sonic cannon...and found nothing. No sign of movement anywhere. Despite the panic, he remembered to activate an X-ray imaging mode, in case something was hiding behind that jack-o-lantern as he had just done himself. But still, there was nothing there.

Taking a few seconds to force himself to dismiss it as nerves or simply some wind he had failed to notice, he turned around, ready to continue forward. _This _time he saw something, a ghost costume produced out of a simple sheet. Its bearer was walking across the intersection, left to right from Cyborg's perspective.

Cyborg instinctively let out a startled yell, and half a second later covered his mouth with his hand, realizing what a bad idea that was.

The damage had already been done.

The costume's step became a turn, and stopped to face Cyborg. After a second, its wearer uttered "Cyborg" with a boy's voice, in a monotonous tone that seemed more of a statement than a yell despite its high volume.

"Cyborg." That one was a girl's voice, from...somewhere far behind Cyborg.

"Cyborg." A different girl's voice to his right, the exact source obscured by the building on the opposite side of the street.

"Cyborg." A boy's voice, obscured by the building right next to him.

The boy Cyborg saw started walking towards him, as the number and density of voices melded into an eerie cacophony.

Cyborg's first thought was to neutralize the immediate threat. Very quickly followed by his second thought: A mental image of a newspaper, with "Crime Fighting Cyborg Goes Haywire" as the front page headline and various components of his systems listed in the classifieds. He growled to himself, with the realization that harming even _zombie _little kids would cause a great deal of problems later. After all, someone was bound to notice their kid missing once this whole situation was resolved.

That was assuming he could resolve it, an assumption that was becoming less plausible the longer he stood around waiting to be surrounded. He went with his first idea and tried running down the middle of the street, past the kid.

The kid lunged at Cyborg with an outstretched hand, but couldn't establish a grip, and the hand slipped off Cyborg's leg as he ran by. Sparing a glance behind, Cyborg saw the kid slowly return to a standing position, before stubbornly plodding along after Cyborg at the same walking pace as before.

Cyborg, still running, was mildly relieved that the kid was unable or unwilling to go any faster. There was no way he'd catch up with Cyborg's running speed, and probably wouldn't have a chance even if he _did_ run. Cyborg reasoned that as long as he stayed out of the kids' reach, he'd have no problem.

But the sheer number of kids would be a problem in its own right. Cyborg hadn't been focusing on the background noise of intermixed voices saying his name, with his attention focused on evading the one kid. The sounds had ceased, but now there were numerous other trick-or-treaters entering his field of vision, all shambling towards him. The rate was more of a trickle now, but he had no doubts it would advance to a pour given sufficient time.

Still running, Cyborg hazarded a glance behind him. Sure enough, there were zombie kids coming onto the street from that direction as well. That settled it, he'd need to find someplace to hide, where he could cut off their access. At least long enough to come up with a plan. There was a warehouse on the outer edge of that industrial park, the edge nearest Cyborg's location. It would have to do, even if it would prove more difficult to secure all the entry points a warehouse was bound to have.

All a question of if he could get there. He set his mind more firmly on running, uncertain whether the resulting perception of faster speed was real or imaginary. Taking an active hand at matters did much to suppress the anxiety, and he wasn't going to let himself be distracted by trivial matters.

Keeping his eye peeled as he continued his sprint, he noticed that all of the kids he saw headed directly for him. This was actually quite advantageous, he realized; because the vast majority of them were appearing from the sides, the geometry of the situation meant they clustered along the side of the road. It wasn't until he was within twenty feet or so that they branched off into the road, and since Cyborg was running down the _middle_ it meant they couldn't catch him.

Four intersections down the road, Cyborg had a problem: He needed to turn. The buildings on the right were now plain-looking buildings instead of decorated, his sign that he'd reached the edge of the industrial park, but the kids were _still_ collected along the sides of the road. Even worse, he saw a set of kids approaching down the street he was on; he'd be surrounded in a matter of seconds if he kept going.

All of which meant he might be forced to try rushing through a less than ideal spot, and hoping for the best. He subtly slowed his advance, both to give himself extra time before reaching that dead end and so he could more easily estimate possible—

_There._

It was one lane of the road with a zombie kid on either side, but it would have to do. He abruptly turned towards the middle of the opening and charged, gritting his teeth as he watched the two, both wearing the pointy hats typical of a witch costume. As did the others, they approached him directly as he neared, his clearance between the two slowly tapering as the lines of kids beside them condensed.

The girl on the left suddenly leapt at him. His instinctive response, learned from years of football, was to shift to the right. Unfortunately his mass was significantly less back then, and inertia thwarted his instinctive movement.

He felt her grab his left leg in midair, pulling him off balance as momentum tried to carry the rest of him past that leg. As his plummet to the street began, he bent his right knee and shoved his foot against the ground, transforming the fall into a makeshift leap.

Cyborg grunted as he hit the pavement, but the jump forced the girl off of her own feet, and she had released her grasp. Getting back to his feet, he saw that he'd made it past the line of kids. As he resuming his running towards the warehouse, he noticed that the one girl was still attempting to rise; she was painstakingly pushing her torso back with her hands, rather than simply bringing a leg in front of her.

He quickly discovered that that side of the line was clear, probably because all of the kids that formed the line had come from there. But whatever extra time that might give him, he still had none to spare. He sent a map to his arm's readout and hazarded a glance at it; the warehouse was right around the corner.

Rounding the corner, the human-sized door in the middle of the wall was the first feature Cyborg saw on the two-story metal building. Running up to the door, he found it unsurprisingly locked. For an instant, he considered simply ramming his way through it; but realized that a pile of splinters would be far less of an impediment for his pursuers, unless he could reseal the doorway before they arrived.

And the sight of the kids coming around the corners on both sides showed that time was in short supply.

Trying to come up with an acceptable alternative, he rattled the doorknob. The doorknob, as well as the deadbolt and the metal door itself, seemed secure enough against usual intrusion measures. But Cyborg smirked, as an idea came to mind.

He reconfigured his right hand into his chainsaw attachment, and set to work on the edge of the door. Carving the width of the saw into the narrow door frame took some time, but the downward motion splitting the deadbolt and the doorknob's latch was far easier. Glancing to both sides at the oncoming crowd of kids, he estimated he had about fifteen seconds left for the next part of his operation.

He turned sideways and pushed the newly unrestrained door open, while switching his hand into a welding attachment. Once inside, he closed the door and set to welding it to its frame. He tried to ignore his panic, as doing the job incompletely by rushing would be just as bad, or worse, than failing to finish.

Just as he'd fused the majority of the door, a loud slam hit the surface, and Cyborg squealed in shock. But the door held. Then there was another slam, and another...and soon, an incessant pounding began, and echoed throughout the building. But still, the door held. He forced himself to turn around amidst the noise, in case there was another weak point he'd have to plug.

The warehouse was dark, save for the moonlight streaming in through a window in the ceiling. Activating his shoulder lamp, he looked around. This warehouse was definitely under low demand; the telltale markings on the floor showed that it used to have storage racks, but none were visible now. And the only used storage was a stack of boxes, on pallets, in the middle of the largely open building.

Still trying to suppress his anxiety as the sound of attempted breaking slowly spread from the door to the walls around it, Cyborg sprinted around the stack of boxes, since it blocked his view...and saw a set of truck doors on the other side of the warehouse. He ran the rest of the way to them, prepared to try fusing these as well.

It turned out to be unnecessary, as the doors were locked directly into the floor with heavy-duty bolts. It'd be easier to break through the door than it would be to break the bolts, and these doors were far heavier than the one that was still holding them off. They were meant to service large trucks, after all.

A resounding clang showed that the kids intended to test Cyborg's theory of durability. By this point noise was ringing out from every direction, and similarly echoing in every direction. Cyborg instinctively covered his ears as he tried to locate some way to get out of reach if he had to, but there was nothing. There was no railing marking the second floor, no other exits that he could see. A handful of support columns were all that reached up to the roof.

Abruptly, all the bangs and clangs stopped, though it took a few seconds for the echoes to die down. It took a few seconds for Cyborg to realize that the onslaught had stopped, but even then he couldn't believe it was happening. He activated his X-ray imaging once more, and saw...an entire crowd of kids, standing on the other side of the door. Not moving away, not looking around, not circling, just standing.

Confused, Cyborg walked around the building, still looking through the wall. There were _hundreds _of them out there, layers pressing against the building's exterior. His X-ray mode didn't distinguish shapes well, so he had to estimate the count by looking for what appeared to be heads; he had no doubt the number was actually higher.

He checked for any visible external staircases or ladders while he was at it, but there was nothing of the sort on the _outside_ of the building either. He breathed a sigh of relief, as he'd managed to get out of immediate danger. He still didn't like how they all just _stopped_, but he'd live with it for now. If they didn't want to get in, fine by Cyborg.

The sudden sound of the roof window shattering, followed by glass fragments hitting the concrete floor and shattering further, dashed Cyborg's hopes.


	4. Chapter 4

Cyborg was _sure_ he saw a dark shape descend from the ceiling, but by the time his light had coverage on the spot, there was nothing there but the bunch of boxes. _Something_ had to have broken the window, though.

He readied his sonic cannon and set it for a low power burst mode, which he hoped would be less likely to accidentally rupture a wall. All those kids were still outside, and on top of not wanting to hurt them, he didn't want to give them the opening they'd so loudly tried to create half a minute ago.

Slowly, he stalked his way towards the boxes, setting his X-ray vision mode to scan past them. His shoulder lamp was still on, as it had been when whatever it was crashed through the roof, so actual surprise wasn't in the cards; but if it made a move he'd see it before it saw him, and the forewarning would keep _him_ from being surprised.

As he carefully approached, he eventually detected something on the other side of the boxes, about fifteen feet behind them from his direction. But it wasn't a kid. It didn't even appear to be animate. Its shape resembled nothing more than a round ball.

There was no movement from it for the few seconds it took to close distance with the pile of boxes. He paused, momentarily ratcheting up his audio sensitivity in expectation of some zombie kids climbing or on the roof after throwing an inanimate object through the window. But the only sounds were the heartbeats and breathing of the legion outside the walls. Knowing that they weren't actually walking dead didn't give him as much relief as he would have liked.

Arbitrarily choosing to approach from the left, Cyborg walked around the stack of boxes, keeping his distance. As he cleared the obstruction, the vague round shape detected by his X-ray mode matched the roundish orange shape he could see.

He quickly recognized the ribbed shape as being that of a pumpkin, about three feet wide and just as tall. Another two steps, and he saw what appeared to be decals in the form of a jack-o-lantern eye and mouth, "looking" to his left. Which was kind of odd, but the pumpkin didn't look to have been hollowed, much less carved; the area around the stem was still intact. Someone came up with the decal idea to get out of the effort normally involved with a jack-o-lantern, maybe.

Still confused at how the pumpkin _got_ here, he next noticed its vine on the ground. The scattered glass fragments from the pumpkin's entry glimmered as Cyborg adjusted his shoulder lamp to get a better look at the green vine. An inch thick, with small but healthy looking green leaves. He didn't know a whole lot about pumpkins, but all seemed to be....

Cyborg paused, realizing the extreme unlikeliness that a pumpkin would be decorated with its vine still attached. Before realizing that the pumpkin's vine connects to its stem, which was still visible and visibly separate on top of the pumpkin.

As if that wasn't enough of a mystery, he then saw a much thinner vine, trailing off into the darkness outside his lamp's range. He turned to follow it with his eyes, turning the lamp to keep it lit. _This_ vine was brown and barely half a centimeter thick; its leaves larger than the other vine's but looked sickly. It was quite long, however, and he eventually found the end.

Wrapped around his left ankle.

Abruptly the vine went taut with the sound of rustling leaves, and he felt a tug. A split second later, it released from his leg and disappeared from view.

He'd been looking at his feet from tracking the vine all the way there, so he didn't see what bludgeoned his head to the right, and the surprise and pain prevented him from reacting before it was followed with a slam to the left.

He swung an arm in the direction he guessed the attacker was coming from, and stepped back. He'd hoped the swing would interrupt the attack, but he was surprised that he had actually _hit_ the thing. His arm had continued its motion, so he looked up to see where he'd knocked the thing off its feet.

The pumpkin was tumbling through the air. Over the next couple seconds, he saw its rotation cancel out, leaving its stem pointing upward. Then he saw it had _four_ green vines dangling down from its base, two of them longer than the other two. Its movement also slowed, so that it ended up floating gently down to the ground, without hitting the wall behind it.

As it descended, one of the longer vines reached out for the ground, its five feet length pointing straight down. As soon as the tip touched the concrete floor, a bizarre transformation occurred: each of the remaining three vines stiffened just as that one had, but then they all _bent_ at various points, forming a shape of some mockery of skeletal structure. The end result looked very much like a stick figure made of vines, with a pumpkin for a head.

The appearance wasn't cosmetic, either; The thing starting running towards Cyborg, just as easily as an actual human would.

Getting a hold of his senses, Cyborg sighed as armed his sonic cannon. "Pumpkin monsters on Halloween? Even _Mad Mod_ ain't that tacky. I don't think." His sonic cannon provided extra emphasis, in the form of a salvo of seven blue beams.

The monstrosity bobbed and weaved with uncanny agility, leaving all of Cyborg's shots to connect with the wall. The wall was only superficially damaged, a result of the lower power setting on Cyborg's cannon, while the thing altered direction and dove for the cover provided by the boxes that were quickly becoming the centerpiece of the room.

Cyborg wasn't too put off by the move, since he was still tracking it with his X-ray vision. He did, however, find it to prudent to silently sidestep away from his spot. He also aimed his cannon towards the center of the single box that comprised the top of the stack.

Cyborg watched through X-ray vision as the abomination leapt into the air and smacked that box towards the ground, impacting right where Cyborg _would_ have been if he hadn't moved. Having anticipated this move, he grinned to himself, made the minor aim adjustment to center on the thing's pumpkin "head", and fired.

He _thought_ he saw his shot connect, but before he could be sure the thing had pushed itself off of a box in a flying charge, and its vine-punch to his torso was _definitely_ a hit.

Since Cyborg saw the attack coming this time, he was able to aim his counterattack more deliberately. The pumpkin monster was _also_ more prepared, however, and smoothly shifted its head out of the way of Cyborg's fist. Without missing a beat, Cyborg stepped forward and launched another swing, forcing it to step back in order to defend itself. He continued to press forward in that fashion for several seconds, keeping his foe from finding an opening to counterattack and simultaneously pushing it back against the boxes, hoping a collision would distract it enough for Cyborg to get the winning punch in.

The plan was reasonably successful; when the pumpkin "head" touched a box it turned to see what it was. Cyborg wasted no time taking a swipe at the thing's body. Oddly enough, the force shoved the rigid vine-limbs out from under the pumpkin; It started to fall to the ground for a split second, before it swept one of its shorter "arm" vines off of Cyborg's forearm and braced against the ground with it.

It had already pushed itself back up to a standing position when Cyborg's next swing came. This time, though, the vines dangled freely, and simply flowed with Cyborg's swing as easily as a string on a balloon. Cyborg unclenched his fist, then grabbed one of the vines as it slid into his hand.

It reacted by going into some sort of frenzy, its other big vines bludgeoned random points all over his body. Cyborg grunted from the pain as he threw the vine off to the side, carrying the rest of the monster with it. It quickly did that jellyfish-like floating thing it had done before, and started to float back to the ground.

Cyborg took the opportunity to fire his sonic cannon at it for the several seconds it took for it to touch down. The shots connected easily, as it seemed unable to dodge while in its floating state. But when it touched the ground to go back to its stick-figure-like form, the only evidence of Cyborg's onslaught was some bubbling and pale marks on the orange surface of the pumpkin; its dodging of the last shot suggested that it wasn't significantly impaired.

Cyborg suddenly realized that the long, thin brown vine was trailing away from the thing again. Then he felt another tug, this time around his torso, as the vine went taut. "You're gonna have to do better than that," Cyborg said mockingly at the futile attempt to pull him to the ground.

With alarming speed, the vine retracted like a rubber band. Hurling the pumpkin towards Cyborg.

Cyborg didn't quite realize what was happening, until the high speed assailant rammed a vine across his head.

He yelled in agony and staggered back a few steps, as the thing flew past him.

"OK," he admitted with some effort, "that was better."

The thing responded by repeating the maneuver from behind him, this time hitting his back. The force was sufficient to throw him to the ground. The jarring impact rang in his ears, sounding like a prolonged version of a basketball hitting the side of his head. As he propped himself up on one arm, he saw the thing a fair distance in front of him, just touching down on the ground. While this thing wasn't _incredibly_ strong, it _was_ persistent, and the small amounts of damage were starting to pile up. Nothing that'd require dedicated repair time...yet.

Lacking any other ideas, he silently boosted the power level of his arm. He figured if shooting didn't stop it, an overpowered punch might do the trick. If he could get it to make contact. He grit his teeth and readied himself to make the punch.

Unsurprisingly, the thing repeated its attack, and was quickly approaching.

Surprisingly, a glowing purple wave raced across Cyborg's vision. As it crossed the vine, the vine snapped audibly.

The pumpkin seemed to slow as a result. Whatever the reason, Cyborg saw it as his opening. With a yell, Cyborg thrust his fist forward. The pumpkin eventually attempted to move out of the way, but not in time. A sickening crunch launched the pumpkin across the warehouse at extreme speed.

Whatever damage Cyborg's punch had done directly would have to remain a mystery, as the pumpkin slammed against the wall with such intensity that its shell was crushed, and its contents fell to the ground with a disturbing squishy sound.

The immediate threat neutralized, Cyborg turned to verify what he already expected. And sure enough, there was Jinx. Seemed the timetable on getting used to her being one of the _good_ guys just got fast tracked.

"What the _hell _is going on?" she demanded of him.

"I don't know!" he answered. "Something about kids being brainwashed or zombified and then the communicators got jammed and then this...pumpkin..._thing_." With that, he indicated the pile of pumpkin pulp with his shoulder lamp. The orange pumpkin pulp, the disconnected vines....

The red pool oozing out of the pulp.

Cyborg blinked, then turned back to Jinx. "Umm...since when do pumpkins _bleed_?"

The telltale sounds of kids banging on the walls chose that moment to resume, with added fervor.

"Can we play xenobiologist _later_?" Jinx yelled over the cacophony. "We need to get out of here."

"How?" Cyborg hollered back. "We're surrounded!"

Jinx shook her head, then smoothly sprinted to one of the corners. She glanced at the floor for a second, then flicked a small purple speck out of her finger.

Cyborg opened his mouth to ask what the heck she was thinking, but he never got to actually saying anything. His eye practically popped out of its socket, as he saw a trapdoor of some sort _literally_ pop out of the floor.

"Come on," she yelled as she pushed the trapdoor all the way open, keeping her eyes on the opening.


	5. Chapter 5

"Why'd it have to be the sewer?" Cyborg complained as he walked behind Jinx down the tunnel.

"Find a better place to get yourself surrounded," she condescendingly suggested.

"What is _that_ supposed to mean?" he said with some annoyance.

"It _means_ you should pick a spot where the _sewer_ isn't the _only_ option instead of _complaining_ about it," she hissed with increasing aggravation.

"'_Pick_'?!?! How was I supposed to know there was only a sewer exit from there?" It only took a fraction of a section for his mind to get to the next step. "Wait. How did _you_ know about the sewer exit? _Or_ the basement floor? _Or_ the trapdoor?"

She sighed, as she made a right turn at a junction. "Gizmo and I used to sneak in there. No idea who put it there, but the false wall made me think no one was supposed to know about it."

Cyborg paused, thinking. The plain sliding door built into the wall behind a filing cabinet _did_ have a secret passage feel to it. "But...why would you want to sneak into a run-down warehouse?"

She stopped walking for half a second, before turning to face him. "It wasn't _always_ run-down, genius. It was owned by an electronics company back when this was a busy industrial district."

"Huh, so _that's_ where Gizmo got his tech," Cyborg said as his gaze drifted off absentmindedly.

Jinx stood there for two awkward seconds, with a frown. "Yeah," she finally stated bluntly, before turning around and continuing down the tunnel. "Come on," she commanded without looking back.

"Yo, what makes you think _you're_ in charge?" Cyborg asked indignantly as he sprinted to catch up, trying not to think about whatever he heard sloshing under his feet.

"You _are_ following me," she answered pointedly.

It took only a split second for him to object. "So? That doesn't mean you're the boss!"

"You really think arguing about this is a good use of your time?"

"Why not? I _am_ following you, _remember_? What else am I gonna do?"

"Maybe you could figure out _what the hell is going on up there!_" Jinx growled. "And maybe _I'll _figure out why I didn't just let that thing turn you into _pumpkin fertilizer_!"

Cyborg didn't know why she was being so hostile, since _he_ was the one who'd been running from hordes of the zombie-like trick-or-treaters and smacked around by a pumpkin thingy. Maybe she was just nervous, like he was.

"OK," he sighed. Figuring that getting more information would be the best step, to say nothing of being a healthy distraction, he asked: "So how'd _you_ get here? I thought Kid Flash was going to a big party or twenty."

"He is," she said with a slight hiss. "I wanted to stay at one of the parties _here_, so he went globe trotting. Said to call if I need anything, but I think we _both_ know about the communicator outage."

Cyborg eyed her lithe form with _both_ eyes, just in case he'd been totally oblivious to an alternate attire. But she had the same black-and-purple bat-like..._thing_ that she always wore. "Wasn't a costume party, huh?"

She shook her head, a movement emphasized by the pink protrusions on either side of her head, as she sidestepped to the left edge of the tunnel. "The one holiday it really fits, and you're expecting me to change it for a _party_?"

As they went on, the tunnel widened ahead, turning into kind of a trench with walkways on each side. It also deepened, enough that there was an easily visible level of sewage collected down there, as opposed to the trickles and splatters that decorated their progress so far. He was still trying to convince himself that he couldn't actually smell any of it, an effort that met with limited success against this new concentration.

"Not really," Cyborg finally responded to Jinx's probably rhetorical question. "Umm...not to change the subject or anything, but...where we goin'?"

"Eventually, out of the sewers."

"_Eventually?_ Aren't there like a _ton_ of storm grates and manholes we've passed by already?"

"Yeah. How many of them are wide enough for you to climb through unnoticed?"

"Oh," Cyborg replied sheepishly once he realized the answer was zero.

"There's an open horizontal outlet down this way, we can get out without needing to open anything _and_ we can see if there's anything out there first. We'll have to take a detour through a treatment plant, but that means the water will be clean where we get out."

"Cool. I'll be thrilled to get away from this smell. So what was I...oh yeah! What happened at the party?"

"A bunch of people had their cellphones lose signal at the same time. Then there was an explosion, it was an outdoor party so we saw and heard it clearly. Everyone else ran off, I went to see what the heck had happened a couple blocks away. Starfire was fighting it out with a giant pumpkin monster, looked like a war zone all around."

"Wait, Starfire? Wait, _giant_ pumpkin? Umm...what happened to Starfire, and how giant we talkin'?"

"Well...being slammed into the pavement a couple times wasn't good for her _complexion_, but the pumpkin didn't get up again after we impaled it on what used to be the corner of a building. Starfire sent me to go get help when another one showed up. And about the size of a compact car, with the vines about three stories long."

Cyborg stopped. "You _left_ her _alone_?!?!" he yelled in a mix of disbelief and anger.

Jinx likewise stopped, and turned around and stormed up to Cyborg with a ferocious scowl. "_HELL YES!_ _Some_ of us aren't built like tanks, and we tend to bruise and _break_ when flung into buildings. She didn't want me to _die_ for her, which was _fine by me!_"

He could only manage a blank stare, shocked by her story almost as much as by the sheer ferocity it came with. She stared back for a couple seconds, a silent dare for him to respond, before she turned on her heel and marched off with a growl. By the time he guessed there might be something else going on with her, she was a good distance away and he was still standing there.

"Yo!" he called out as he set his feet in motion against the thankfully dry walkway, "Wait up!"

She didn't stop, nor did she turn to look behind her. She did, however, slow down slightly after a couple seconds.

When Cyborg finally caught up with her, he wasn't any closer to figuring out what her problem was. Maybe she was _really_ nervous. Maybe she was always antisocial like this. Maybe she just didn't care about Starfire. But none of those possibilities seemed enough to justify her response.

Her fuming was almost palpable, and he found himself wondering if he'd be safer with the giant pumpkin. He couldn't decide, but he _was_ certain that he was growing increasingly nervous with the only appreciable sounds being his own footsteps. He tried to come up with something to say, _anything_ to say, to end the silence while not causing a repeat of her outburst.

"So...um....Where'd you say you and Starfire took the big pumpkin down?" He was aware of how meek that sounded, but maybe it would be an advantage here.

She sighed, listlessly. "Several blocks south of where we'll come out of the sewer system," she said with a hint of dour resignation.

"Think we could make it back there?"

"Depends on if the area's still swarming with brainwashed kids. Why?"

"Maybe there's a clue there, to find out where these things are coming from. I bet it's Mad Mod."

She turned her head towards him, an eyebrow creased. "Mad Mod?" she skeptically repeated.

"Well he _is_ tacky, and he's done holiday things and brainwashing stuff before. But that pumpkin didn't have a British flag painted on it or anything, either, so maybe it's not him."

"Plus, it's a pumpkin."

"Yeah? It's Halloween, too," Cyborg responded with some confusion.

"You don't get it," she said with exasperation. "The use of pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns originated in North America; the British fanboy would've gone with turnips or something else that was part of the original tradition in Britain."

Cyborg raised an eyebrow at this factoid. "Are you and Raven in the same book club or something?" He realized it was probably a stupid thing to say _after_ he had finished saying it.

She stopped walking and snapped her head towards him, leading him to stop as well. "_What?_" Definitely a stupid move on his part, but on the other hand she didn't look nearly as angry as she did moments ago.

Fortunately he had an answer to this one. "Just seems like an odd thing to know, but also like something Raven would know, you know?" He hoped the dismissive tone of voice with the book club comment had only been his imagination.

"Is there a _problem_ with that?" Didn't sound like it was his imagination.

"What? I _like_ Raven, remember?"

"_**You....**_" she snarled with a sudden burst of fury. Then just as abruptly as the venomous glare was in place, it was retracted; It was too quick for Cyborg to identify whatever facial expression marked the transition. "Whatever," she dismissed the whole exchange with, before she walked on.

Cyborg groaned in annoyance, as he sped up to match pace with her side-by-side. "OK, look. _Whatever's_ going on, we're gonna have to work together if we want to get through it." He paused very briefly, expecting to hear a snort or other sign of derision out of Jinx, but again the only sound he heard was his own footfalls. "So as long as we're stuck together, can we at least _try_ to be civil to each other?" He'd have to figure out how she could walk so silently in those shoes later.

"That's a _really_ good question," she responded snidely, "seeing as you've done nothing but _gripe_ about everything I've done this whole time."

Cyborg really, _really_ wished she was wrong. "OK, OK...Guess I'm just a little nervous...OK a _lot_ nervous. What with being cut off from the other Titans, zombie townspeople, psycho pumpkins...this kinda stuff is only supposed to happen in Halloween _movies_. So...what'd it take to start over on our little piece of the nightmare?"

"Well you could start by not making snide remarks every time I know something you don't," she said without missing a beat.

He took a deep breath. On one hand, she was still going on like everything was _his_ fault. On the other, she didn't say anything about the sewer or Starfire, just the book club remark that _was_ pretty dumb. "Fine," he said with some reluctance.

She sighed with some reluctance of her own. "Yeah, OK. So what was your plan, before locking yourself in a warehouse?"

"And what is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Oh please, like all the creepy people half-yelling your name _wasn't_ your cue to improvise?"

His organic eye widened slightly in surprise. "You heard that?"

"Yeah, pretty hard to miss. How did you think I found you?"

"Huh, guess that makes sense. Well anyway, my _plan_ was to get to the T-Car and then drive back to the Tower. But I kinda got side-tracked when all the kids gathered to see me. Guess the T-Car is out of the question now, huh?"

"Yeah. Probably just as well; you weren't going to get far unless you were planning on plowing over a lot of kids. Any particular reason for heading to the Tower?"

"Well, I was able to get some signal to the Tower, by remotely connecting through the T-Car, but I couldn't reach any of the others _or _my own communicator through the Tower. The noise on the comm array didn't show any direction that was stronger, so the source has gotta be close by. Plus, Raven was at the Tower monitoring everyone's patrols, she'll know more about what's going on."

Jinx suddenly stopped and looked at Cyborg, a look of worry on her face. "Wait, Raven's _at_ the Tower?"

"Yeah...." He didn't like where his mind was going.

"Shouldn't the Tower have a stronger connection to her than to the T-Car?"

Cyborg was pretty sure his heart was trying to skip a beat. That it had no choice in the matter only made it a tangible discord, like a pain in his mind. Just another natural part of being unnatural. "Aww man....Yeah, she should've responded. The signal would've been routed through to the console in the command center, the wireless interference couldn't have messed with the wired connection like that. Something must've happened to her. We gotta get there ASAP...or maybe we should check on Starfire first...damn, this keeps going from bad to worse!" He sighed, despondently. "Hate to say it, but I got no idea what we should be doing."

"We'll head south to Starfire's last known position, then head west until we reach the coast, and get to the Tower from there."

Cyborg gave up on complaints about following her. "You really think Starfire's still there?"

"It's a short enough detour to make it worth checking, even more so if you can actually find some clues. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to go after something that can take down Raven without all the help I can get."

Cyborg shuddered. "I hear _that_. Ain't a lot of things that can tangle with her and expect to win."

"I know. I'm _one_ of them."


	6. Chapter 6

"—still can't believe you could get Gizmo to wade through the sewer."

Jinx snorted at Cyborg's poor grasp of the obvious. "Gizmo? _Wade_? How often did you see him _walk_?"

"Oh yeah, he was into the flying thing, huh."

"Yeah." She rolled her eyes, an expression she was _pretty_ sure he couldn't see since she was leading the way.

His maps of the sewer system were out of date, and even with his stubbornness in the way he knew better than to try fumbling around with no sense of direction. Now that they were past the treatment plant, the rest of the way out was pretty much just following the flow of the water. She'd neglected to mention that, however.

Cyborg continued. "So why'd _you _ever come down here, anyway? Can't imagine anyone _wanting _to be stuck in tight spaces with Gizmo."

"Gizmo's never been big on foresight. Or patience. Or silence. He got all the way in one time, just to get caught throwing a tantrum at a door. Security patrols were ramped up because they only found Gizmo and expected the rest of us to show up, whole plan had to be aborted...Decided he needed supervision."

Cyborg was silent for only a second. "I can see how that would be a problem. Couldn't guide him remotely, though?"

"It'd be less aggravating, if it _worked_. Our communicators didn't have the range, though, especially not down here surrounded by rock and dirt."

"Really?" He seemed genuinely surprised. "Ours work just fine down here...under normal circumstances, anyway."

Jinx sighed. "That's because anyone looking for _you_ can just knock on the Tower door. _We_ needed to keep a low profile, so having transmissions detected across town wasn't an option." She'd had this discussion with her own team—former team—dozens of times. It was _still_ old coming from Cyborg.

"So what, you had the communicators talking to each other over short range?"

"_Yes_." she hissed. It was like Mammoth had handed Cyborg a script.

"Say, that gives me an idea. Hold up!"

She pivoted on the back of her heel mid-step, smoothly turning to face Cyborg. "What?"

"Let me see your communicator," he calmly responded.

Had the device been more than a bright yellow piece of junk, cut off from the Titan communication network, she'd have asked him what he wanted it for first. As it was, she decided not to waste time; and wordlessly drew the communicator, handing it to him. She was not happy to discover the memory of handing him a H.I.V.E. communicator coming back to her now. Back when he'd infiltrated the academy in disguise as Stone and apparently just for fun had—

The sudden urge to exact retribution was almost overwhelming; only held in check by her self-discipline and sense of self-preservation. Her fist was clinched in anger at herself, knowing that if she'd remembered this properly before, she could've just let the pumpkins get rid of him while she got out of town.

But she had passed that opportunity by, and now it was gone. Leaving her stuck in the city limits, and needing to avoid negative attention. And as much as she loathed it, Cyborg's loud stubbornness made him perfect for drawing attention...or fire. To her chagrin, that made him more useful than intolerable. Getting rid of him, one way or another, wasn't worth the increased risk she'd assume from whatever stupid menace was all over the city.

She took a deep breath, trying to calm down and get her mind away from unhelpful memories. Forcing herself to look at him, it seemed traversing her chain of thought hadn't taken nearly as much time as it felt like it had: a thin, wide gray cable coming out of his torso was plugged into the bottom of her communicator, and he was busy looking at one of his forearms while fingering at some buttons on it with his other hand. Changing some software configuration, she guessed, and oblivious to her interior monologue. All the better.

"Alright," Cyborg said, his enthusiastic tone confirmed the suspected obliviousness. "Got the communicator all set up for encrypted ad hoc mode."

"OK," she answered with a challenging tone, "so what're the other endpoints supposed to be?" If he thought he could impress or cow her with technical terms, he was about to be disappointed. She'd picked up some of the vocabulary on her own, since it was glaringly obvious that Gizmo couldn't explain anything if he wanted to. And he never wanted to.

"Huh? Oh, uh, me. My integrated communication circuitry, at least."

She crossed her arms. "So we can talk to each other over communicators," she said dismissively.

"Yeah, I know, the jamming'll cut down the effective range, but it's good to be prepared and easy enough to do."

She inwardly cursed, as this made him even _less_ disposable. "I guess. And if the fog is as heavy as it was forecasted—"

"Fog?" he interrupted, prompting a growl from Jinx. "I totally forgot about the fog, it hadn't drifted far enough inland to see from where I was. My alternate vision modes aren't gonna cut it."

She suppressed the inappropriate glee at the not-really-that-good fortune. "You really can't see in fog?" she asked a little too eagerly.

Cyborg looked at her, brow furled, for half a second before answering. "I can _see_, yeah; but the coastal fog is supposed to be pretty heavy. Water density 'll be too much to get any extra range on the thermal mode, and the x-ray mode won't work at all."

So he could see just as far as she could. Dang it. "Might need those communicators more than you thought." And more than she thought, but no need to mention _that_. "This is actually a good thing, I had _no_ idea how we could sneak around town undetected until now." And it'd make it easier to ditch him if the crap hit the fan, too.

"Yeah. So...do you want it?" he asked, reaching out with the communicator in hand.

Jinx made no comment about forgetting that her arms were still crossed, simply taking the communicator. "I'm surprised these things don't automatically fall back to an ad hoc mode," she said to distract herself from reliving the passing-of-the-communicator memory. "It'd be a lot less trouble than setting it up manually."

"Used to. Used to be wide-open, too; turn on one communicator and you could get any other conversations across the whole set of 'em." He scoffed in derision. "_Was_ real convenient, the Brain sure appreciated it."

Her eyes darted around, instinctively at attention. She was _sure_ she'd heard something in the distance, something reminiscent of water. But it had been overlapped by Cyborg's voice, so she couldn't guess the distance from the volume. It'd also reached both ears at the same time, so she couldn't tell if it came in front or from behind. Not seeing anything unexpected in front of her, she glanced over her shoulder. Nothing out of the ordinary, there either.

"What's up?" Cyborg asked.

Jinx shook her head. "Thought I heard something." Might've been her imagination, as she didn't hear it again, but she didn't trust in that.

"I didn't hear anything." But of course he _wouldn't_ hear anything, his voice would've drowned out any sound reaching his ears, or the equivalent auditory system.

"We should still get going," she said as she turned around and started in the direction of their goal. Best chance of getting away from whatever hypothetical might be there; they'd have to deal with anything in that direction regardless, and there was no reason to mess with something coming from the opposite direction.

"Uh, yeah," Cyborg agreed as he fell into step behind her. "Don't wanna wait for anything to catch up with us."

Silence reigned for a couple minutes. Might've been restful, if Jinx wasn't on alert for whatever she might've heard. And she hoped Cyborg was equally on guard.

Rounding a corner, she finally saw something out of the ordinary. "Hold on," she told Cyborg.

"Is it..._lit_ up there?"

"Sure looks like it," she answered. Whatever was at the end of the section of tunnel they were now in, it was certainly well lit. She had expected Cyborg to make some joke about "the light at the end of the tunnel"; but if he had the comment, he graciously kept it to himself. "Wait here," she said, "I'm gonna check it out."

She made a quiet advancement towards the end of the tunnel, hoping to avoid becoming the target of an unpleasant surprise. Fortunately this tunnel was sufficiently wide that she didn't need to set foot in the small stream of water down the middle. She was almost to the end, when she heard a squishing sound under her own foot.

Jinx immediately stopped, looked around quickly for any potential observers, then lifted up her foot to see what she managed to step in while she wasn't paying attention to the ground. It was a vivid green, and looked like a slimy patch. Algae, most likely. As if that weren't odd enough, the floor in front of her had several more clumps of the stuff, the density increasing as it neared the edge of a wide chamber.

Seemed time to put the communicator to the test. "Get over here," she whispered into the device. Followed soon by the sound of splashing footsteps. She had to shake her head at his ineptitude when it came to stealth, but that wasn't what she was keeping him around for. Once he was close enough, she gestured with a hand for him to check out the stuff. Then she carefully made her way to the edge of the tunnel, this time making sure she paid attention to the ground as well as the view in front of her.

The chamber was circular, allowing her to see the whole thing without getting into the light. It appeared to be a large basin of some sort, as the water level was as wide as the chamber itself, and the water was too deep to see the floor. There were three other shaded tunnel exits like the one she was in, equally spaced around the chamber. In theory Cyborg could make himself useful with his thermal vision or other way of seeing in the dark; this place was too removed from the outside environment for fog to gather here.

A ring of gray metal grating surrounded the edge, with some green spread here and there. And two level bridges of the same grating ran across from this tunnel to the one on the opposite end of the basin, and between the two other tunnels...except the point where the two should've crossed was missing, and the surrounding chunk was mangled. She could see a bunch of thin supports descending from the grating into the water three feet below. Water whose surface was densely speckled with clumps of what she still believed was algae, and even concentrated in wider masses at points.

Aside from that, the only points of interest were the lights higher up. Otherwise it was just a large basin. She certainly didn't remember any sort of interior lighting being down here before, though, that development would have to have been relatively recent.

She heard Cyborg coming up from behind. After a second, he quietly announced: "All clear, those tunnels are empty, far as I can see."

The two of them walked forward into the light and slightly off to the side, Jinx still on guard while Cyborg continued his report. "That green stuff is algae. It's alive, but it's just regular algae, nothing special about it. I don't get what this area is supposed to be _for_, though. Or why there's algae at all. We're _past _the treatment plant so the water's supposed to be all clean, right?"

"Yeah, it _should_ be. This might be a place for maintenance crews to get access to, but that wouldn't explain the algae here. They need nutrients to grow like this, and the water should be purified back here. Unless it's coming from somewhere else—wait. You said that algae back there's alive?"

"Yeah...so? I bet all the stuff down in the water's alive too."

But Jinx's mind was already racing. The water was too low for it to have recently deposited algae all the way back in the tunnel. And if this _was_ a maintenance spot it likely wouldn't have wildly varying heights of water. Unless something caused waves in the water. Something that could also have broken through the middle of the bridges.

Her head suddenly turned towards the water; she had seen some movement through her peripheral vision. Slight ripples where she had seen wide masses of algae before.

And where she didn't see them now.

Her instincts told her to move. She obliged them with a backflip. She heard Cyborg about to voice his confusion, before she heard a loud slam against the wall. Even before she fully landed, she saw that there was now a giant vine, with leaves that resembled oversized lily pads more than anything else, pressed against the wall where she had been less than a second ago.

Cyborg wasn't so lucky. As that one vine curled back into the water, another whipped out and hit Cyborg. He hadn't ventured far enough away from the tunnel, and the force threw him back down it. Jinx heard his squeal of surprise grow quieter in short order.

She glanced off to the side, and saw a large green pumpkin, floating in the gap between the bridges that she'd seen earlier.

"So much for the meat shield."

* * *

Another vine lashed out at Jinx, after the other vine had rolled back under the water.

She jumped back out of the way, having seen the incoming vine, and it impacted against the wall again. This vine curled itself back under the water as well, which Jinx thought was odd. Perhaps it lacked the range of motion to reach out to the side. Anything with the strength to push Cyborg's weight around would crush her like a twig, though, so even if it _did_ lack the agility it could still end very badly for her.

She started sprinting around the edge of the basin, looking back to toss a hex just above the tunnel she'd come out of, and that Cyborg was presumably disabled in. And meat shield or not, she couldn't allow _both_ of them to be taken out.

The green pumpkin in the water reacted by shoving a vine out in the water in front of her path, the curling retraction tearing a chunk out of the catwalk and spraying metal fragments into the air. It had made the mistake of striking too _far_ in front of her, and she effortlessly flipped over the newly missing section of grating.

It reacted by repeating the same maneuver at the point of her landing, sending _her_ up in the air with a surprised yell. She recovered from her shock quickly enough, and as she neared the brick wall she pushed off of it with her feet, landing on her feet at the edge of one of the bridges leading into the middle of the algae splotched pool.

She pushed off against the bridge as soon as she touched down, making a simple backwards jump to the grating around the edge, and tossed a hex at the point where she had landed. The instinctive move paid off: A vine shoved its way through the bridge support with a series of metallic snaps, and the hex impacted against one of the vine's lily-pad-like leaves.

A short, high-pitched moan reverberated through the basin chamber. Jinx saw the leaf wither and a patch of the vine around it turn brown, before the whole vine was hurriedly rolled back into the water. The pumpkin then rapidly lowered itself under the water, the sudden displacement causing a splash and sending ripples throughout the pool's surface.

Silence reigned. Jinx sidestepped carefully around the wall, towards the nearest tunnel. She kept her eyes peeled for movement in the center of the pool, fully expecting the thing to come back up at any moment. Knowing the rippling would certainly mask the effects of any subtle movement only heightened her attention, and her pulse rate.

She involuntarily jumped up a foot when the silence was broken by Cyborg's voice.

"Huh?"

She instinctively looked at the direction of his voice, which turned out to be the tunnel to her right. Her peripheral vision noticed the green shape popping out of the center of the water, and she quickly jumped back away from the tunnel entrance.

The pumpkin shot out _three_ vines, one through the supports of each remaining bridge fragment, the cacophony of metal echoing all around. The vines curled back to their origin under the water, the three bridges submerging as the vines ceased supporting their weight. The pumpkin itself then retreated once more under the water.

"What the hell was _that_?"

Jinx growled at Cyborg's obliviousness. "Can you see that thing?" she half-shouted, trying herself to track any movement through the new set of waves rippling across the surface.

"No, too much refraction." he answered.

So he couldn't see past the ripples either. Typical uselessness. "It's—"

She was cut off by the green gourd surfacing, and she dodged out of the way before the predicted vine tried to crush her against the wall. Cyborg managed to get far enough out of its way this time to avoid the same.

With a growl, he armed his sonic cannon and fired a salvo of blue beams at the pumpkin. "Take _that_ you son of a...vine!" Jinx, meanwhile, dodged backwards, expecting another attack any second.

She wasn't disappointed, as two vines immediately shot out again, one going under the grating where her feet used to be, and the other where Cyborg's still were. The vine near her curled up shooting more pieces of metal into the air. She didn't quite get as much headway this time, and grunted as a jagged metal edge scraped her left sleeve.

The pain wasn't distracting enough for her to miss the other vine enveloping Cyborg as it curled up under the water with no apparent loss in speed, nor the flurry of motion splashing on the water's surface near the pumpkin, in the angle Cyborg was in. Did he need to breathe?

She repeatedly flipped forward with newfound resolve, totally aware that anything capable of moving Cyborg without slowing would easily reduce her body to a bloody paste. Searing pain in her arm or not, she had no intention of becoming a condiment for the thing's next meal.

To her surprise, there were no more attacks. Three seconds later, she hazarded a look over at the pumpkin. It was still there, but it seemed to be...rotating in the water, slowly. The motion indicative of Cyborg continued, but was now offset, and following the rotation of the pumpkin itself. Then she realized, that whenever the thing attacked with multiple vines they were always spaced at right angles apart.

She had a plan now. She sprinted forward, slowing at the point where Cyborg seemed to be at a forty-five degree angle from her, and tossed a series of hexes from her right hand at the abomination. It weathered each attack, its shell browning slightly with each one, and tried turning towards her. But as she suspected, holding Cyborg's weight was seriously hampering its mobility, and a couple steps every second as it tried to figure out _which_ way to turn was all it took to remain out of harm's way.

When the thing tried to submerge, she threw a hex with both hands at the water near by. The water level at the spot lowered a couple feet, and the depression carried over to the center of the pool before suddenly erupting and tossing the pumpkin into the air.

It didn't seem damaged at all, but it _did _release its grasp on Cyborg, who grabbed the vine that had been holding him, and threw it and the attached pumpkin directly against the wall.

Before he splashed into the water.

Jinx quickly ducked, to ensure that the vine flying over her head remained _over_ her head, and watched the gourd and its vines impact the wall. There was a high-pitched shriek, and the entire chamber shook from the force of the impact. The wall didn't break however, and thankfully the ceiling didn't come down on top of her head either.

The thing fell onto the grating below it, but the pumpkin was too large to fit on the grating's width and rolled unceremoniously into the water. Its vines were limp, like long deflated balloons, and their edges still laid on the grating, while presumably still attached to the pumpkin in the water on their other ends.

After checking for any motion for a couple of seconds, Jinx jogged around to the spot where she last saw Cyborg, hopping over a couple of the gaps in the grating on the way. She didn't find any indication of movement in the water, however. She was ready to head off on her own, when a soft splashing sound got her attention. She reasonably assumed it was the pumpkin coming back to life, having no way to tell if the thing was knocked out or dead or whatever after it sank into the water.

It turned out to be Cyborg, though. Or more accurately, Cyborg's two extendable hands grabbing onto the junction between the ring of grating and the remaining piece of the fourth bridge, which the monster had neglected to totally demolish when it obliterated the other three. As Jinx ran over there, Cyborg rose out of the water, before eventually propping a leg against the grating and pushing himself the rest of the way out of the water.

He then collapsed onto the grating, spit a ton of water out over the side, and tried to take deep breaths while coughing profusely. Then he put a hand against his back, and sat up with an audible crack and a grunt of pain as he bent his back against his hand. Then he sighed with relief.

"I've decided...not to eat...lobster anymore," he said between breaths. "For now."

She eyed him for a couple seconds, but other than the splotches of algae stuck over various parts of his robotic frame, he appeared no worse for wear. Still, with as hard as he was breathing..."Are you going to live?" Tossing the thing around was _easily_ the most useful thing he'd managed to do, only fair to check if he could do anything of the sort again.

"Yeah." A couple deep breaths later, and his breathing seemed back to normal. "Wouldn't want to try that _again_, and all this slimy stuff feels...well, slimy; but otherwise I'll be fine." Then he coughed a few times.

Jinx grit her teeth, as the pain in her arm suddenly drew attention to itself. She made a play of crossing her arms. "Really," she said skeptically to Cyborg as she glanced down at her left forearm.

Sure enough, there was a tear in the top of her sleeve, and the pale gray skin underneath bore a streak of crimson. She gave Cyborg a skeptical glare as she as adjusted her right hand over the wound and applied pressure with her palm, in case it was still bleeding.

"I know, I don't get it either!" Cyborg retaliated as he stood up. "It's like it wasn't _trying_ to crush me, it was just holding me under the water. Expected to have a _lot _more joints to pop back into place."

"Is _that_ what that was?"

"Yeah, the thing doubled me over when it pulled me under the water."

Green motion across the pool caught her eye, and she turned her head to get a better look. There was the pumpkin again, approaching the two of them with its vines floating on top of the water.

"Aww man," Cyborg said with dejection, "Can't that thing just _quit_?"

Jinx scowled. She checked the angles on the vines, amount of rotation. "Guess we'll have to _make _it quit." Then she hopped onto the bridge and ran full speed down it, towards the pumpkin.

"Yo!" Cyborg said with surprise.

She flipped into the air at the edge of the bridge.

"What are—"

She briefly landed _on_ the pumpkin, jumping back into the air in the same direction as soon as she set down.

"How the—"

She landed smoothly on the grating, on the opposite end of the basin from where she started.

"How did—"

With a little shout, she thrust her arms towards the water and a set of three wide hexes entered the surface. These hexes quickly resolved into a wave that lifted the pumpkin into the air and carried it forward. As it dissipated, it stranded the pumpkin on the bridge section; her careful aim landing it upright so it wouldn't roll off. Now that the pumpkin was finally out of the distortive effects of the water, she could see that it was about half as tall as Cyborg was, and as wide as it was tall. Its vines trailed off into the water, leaving Cyborg a clear path to it down the bridge. Cyborg thankfully saw the opportunity, and ran right up to it. With a prolonged yell, he slammed his fists against the shell, each impact accompanied with a sickening squeal from the thing.

His yell quickly shifted from furious to shocked when his fist punctured a hole in the shell. A high pressure stream of white bubbly foam with streaks of red shot out of the hole, splattering all over the wall and grating behind Cyborg, and presumably on Cyborg's arm as well. After a couple of seconds the foam spray stopped, and the vines shriveled and shrunk towards the punctured pumpkin, itself shriveling up and losing about a third of its size.

"Umm...eww," was the first thing Cyborg managed to say. A sentiment Jinx agreed with, as a smell somewhere between cabbage and uncooked shrimp meat was now filling the chamber. "You think it's gone?" Cyborg asked, the high pitch of his voice presumably caused from plugging his nose.

Jinx frowned as she walked around the edge of the basin, overriding the urge to plug her own nose by reminding herself that she'd seen Mammoth _eat_ things that smelled worse. "Maybe you should use some of those scanners, instead of asking for an opinion from the opposite end of the room," she replied.

"Oh yeah, huh." He took a deep breath, before removing two fingers of his left hand from the bridge of his nose. Then he shook his right arm, flinging off little white blobs, before pushing some spots on his left arm.

Jinx had circled around the basin and was standing next to Cyborg when he finally released his breath and braved the olfactory onslaught. "This is really weird," Cyborg. "It's not alive, and that's a _recent_ development based on the cellular decay. But except for some traces of blood plasma I can't pick up any compounds unusual for a simple plant."

"This thing sure wasn't sessile. No blood cells?"

"Nope. Makes no sense for there to be serum without cells, but if they were ever there they're all gone now. Thing's hollow though, so maybe..."

"Wait," Jinx cut in. "Hollow?"

"Uhh...that's what I said, yeah. There's nothing inside the shell now, it all splashed...over there," he concluded, indicating the wall to his right with a nod of his head.

She looked to the spot. Then looked down on the pool's surface. The foam had made itself into a white mat, resembling bog material more than the foam she saw.

"Anything down there?" she asked.

"Why would there be...whoa!" he exclaimed. "I didn't see _that_."

Probably too worried about the rest of the pumpkin to be looking behind him. "That foam might've been the blood, and the white stuff the clotting factor. So there should be blood cells and...organs...down there."

"Eww. Again. At least we won't have to touch 'em..." And with that, he turned to scan the field of white below.

Jinx set her mind on listening for any sounds out of the ordinary. Sounds such as reinforcements for the pumpkin. As much as they could use any clues, it'd all be worthless if they couldn't act on any of them. All seemed normal, or as normal as a foam-blood-laced basin in a sewer treatment output path could possibly be, but that didn't necessarily mean nothing was out there.

"OK," Cyborg said, "You were right about it being blood, but I can't find any organs down there. Or, well, _in_ this husk here."

"Almost certainly not a normal creature then...No nanotech?"

Cyborg scoffed. "You really think I didn't check for nanites?"

Jinx lowered an eyebrow and crossed her arms, again making use of the distraction to apply pressure to the cut on her arm. "You _did_ forget to look behind you."

"OK, fine, but I _did_ check for any tech and I got nothing."

Jinx sighed. That heavily weighted the odds towards the thing being _magically _animated, which wasn't the sort of thing she wanted to be dealing with on Halloween night. "So we're probably looking at a spell having made this thing from a normal pumpkin. Don't suppose there's anything unusual in the blood cells?"

"Yeah, actually, some weird compounds bound to the hemoglobin. Can't identify 'em though."

"Can you track them?"

"If we're looking for blood exposed to the air, might be able to pick up a trail; but the signature's too faint otherwise."

Jinx took a deep breath, an action she quickly regretted as the scent in the air seemed to attach itself to her tongue. She spit into the water, hoping to at least lessen the effect. "Gross. Anyway, what kind of range will you have if it _is_ exposed to air?"

"Quarter of a mile, in ideal conditions. But is that really going to help us?"

"Depends on if the huge pumpkin Starfire and I smashed oozes blood as much as the one you smashed at the warehouse did."

"Oh yeah...we still going there then?"

Jinx rolled her eyes. "If you have a better idea, now's the time."

Cyborg answered a little too readily. "Yeah, I got one. How about you track the magic from this thing or somethin' to find the source? You're a sorceress or something, aren't ya?"

"Sure," she said with sarcastic enthusiasm, "all I need is a crystal ball, a pound of calcium salts, and an ounce of the thing's blood. Oh, and a time machine."

"A time machine?"

"Yeah, so we can go back and _find someone who actually knows how to do that_."

It took a couple of seconds for Cyborg to process all that. "You really can't do it?"

Since he at least could be construed to have been attempting to be respectful by calling her a "sorceress" instead of a "witch", she gifted him with a real response. "No, I can't. Raven may be an all-arounder, but _I_ don't have any gift for spells that locate things. Nor do I know any."

"So what was with all that stuff you mentioned?"

She rolled her eyes, as the list wasn't supposed to be taken seriously. "A crystal ball is the stereotypical, or traditional depending on who you ask, focus for locating; calcium salts burn orange, which seems appropriate for things pumpkin related; and the blood _probably_ has the closest connection to the spell since normal plants don't have blood per se."

"Huh. For not knowing how to do it you sure seem to know a bit about it."

"Knowing a recipe calls for sugar and an oven doesn't help much with the end result on its own. Now let's get going, I don't want to find out if that thing called for reinforcements."

Cyborg shuddered at the thought. "No kidding. So...which way are we goin'? I lost track."

"That way," she said as she pointed across the chamber to the tunnel at the opposite end.

"You sure?"

She glanced at the tunnel behind them. More specifically, at the crescent moon pattern above it, which she'd placed with a hex when the fighting started to mark which way they came in. "Positive."

"OK, let's go."

As they made their way around the chamber and then down the tunnel, Jinx was torn. On one hand, she was thoroughly annoyed that Cyborg had proven himself useful, which put a damper on any plans to ditch him. On the other hand, he had proven himself useful, more so than the teammates she was accustomed to leading.

Several feet into the tunnel, Cyborg cleared his throat. "So, umm...I'm kinda wondering why all sorts of movies and stuff mention virgin's blood as a spell ingredient. Is it really that...I dunno, good?"

Mediocre choice for a conversation topic, but she could work with it. "Can't tell you firsthand, but I've never seen anything that seriously suggested the 'virgin' aspect has any significance. Might just mean that it calls for blood that hasn't been chemically altered, same meaning as virgin olive oil. Although, I guess if you were specifically looking _for _a virgin it might have some use."

"Well, we _are_ lookin' for Beast Boy..."


	7. Chapter 7

_(Author's note: OK, five months later than I thought it'd be...but here's the next chapter!)_

* * *

Cyborg took a deep breath of the fresh, moist air. The foggy air felt cool against the few areas of actual skin he still had. The gentle trickling of a tiny stream was less stressful than the silence. The tight squeeze from crawling through the last section of pipe to get out of what certainly _felt _like a subterranean labyrinth was more than a reasonable price to pay, in his mind.

The fog gave a wide, fuzzy ring to the full moon, but its location in the sky was still quite obvious. The small flow of water coming out of the same pipe he'd just been in, on the other hand, faded into gray obscurity sixty feet ahead. It flowed thinly over a gravelly streambed, with tall grasses lining each bank.

Putting a couple fingers against the side of his head, he activated the thermographic mode in his electronic eye. The imagery was grayscale, and some of the tints were decidedly out of place, but it worked: He saw the stream continue flowing onward for another fifty feet past where it melded into the fog, before it veered off to the left and behind the grass along its banks.

He pushed a button on his forearm, his electronic eye seeing varying levels of heat from the different materials that composed his body frame. "I'm clear," he whispered into the panel. "Where are you?"

"To the left," came Jinx's similarly whispered reply over both the panel and Cyborg's ears.

She was kneeling behind a tall, leafy bush; looking out over the edge of what seemed to be a small cliff. She was in the bush's shadow, so she was only lit indirectly; but as far as Cyborg's thermal vision was concerned, she might as well have glowed in the dark.

Cyborg crept over to the same bush, making a deliberate effort to mask his own visual exposure. "Can you see anything down there?" he asked in a hushed tone.

"No movement as far as I can see."

He gazed out past the bush himself, which was an easy task since he was too bulky to crouch as low as Jinx even if he had wanted to. The rock face was only about ten feet tall, he estimated, and the wide surface below was covered with smoothly trimmed grass.

Beyond normal visual range, his thermographic vision perceived the stream as it continued below, gently meandering into a nearby pond. A small foot bridge crossed over the stream, connecting the dirt paths on either side that formed a ring around the area. Scattered large, leafy trees dotted the view of the park.

Most significantly, a handful of white spots, child-shaped, were roaming off in the distance along the footpath. Their lumbering movement gave them away as more zombie kids, but they didn't appear to be heading anywhere in particular. Near as Cyborg could guess, they were simply patrolling the park, and had no idea that he or Jinx were anywhere near.

Far off, he guessed about two hundred feet away, a thick set of smaller trees suggested the edge of the park's area. The image appeared dull and mottled, however. He craned his neck to see the mottling pattern, and for a brief moment he was surprised to find the pattern originated in his own eye.

"Kids're out there," he whispered, "but I don't think they know we're here. Edge of the park's a couple hundred feet off, and that's the range limit on my thermograph. Fog must still be settling in, I didn't think I'd be able to see as far I am."

"Better get across before it finishes settling, then. Can we make it across _without_ incapacitating any of them?"

Cyborg almost couldn't believe she said that. "You'd _really _consider doing that?"

"It's not on top of my list of things to do, but higher than standing around and waiting for them to call up whatever the pumpkin of the hour is. Now can we make it or not?"

He growled softly as he looked out again. There were only a few kids, not nearly enough to maintain full coverage. They all followed the path around the outside edges of the park, meaning the area in the middle was unwatched.

"Yeah, I think so. There ain't many, and they're all patrolling the outside edges, so we can sneak past them when there's a gap and get to the middle, then sneak out of the park when a gap opens up there."

"Alright. You take the lead, I'll follow."

He decided against making a comment about who was leading now, since he was sure she'd throw it right back at him as soon as the opportunity arose. And as appalling as her willingness to knock out little kids was, _her_ nerves sure wouldn't fail anytime soon.

For a minute that felt like an eternity, he waited for the prime opportunity. Refusing to be nervous, he worked out the overall plan in detail in his mind: When the patrols were sufficiently distant, he'd descend to the ground level, and sneak over to the bridge. Crossing the bridge would give them access to the central area of the park, where he hadn't seen any patrols go through. Hiding amidst a few trees if necessary, they would wait until another patrol hole came up, and then make their way out of the park. Nice and easy.

He almost missed the gap he was looking for. "Let's do this," he whispered, before hopping down from the edge. The noise sounded very loud in his mind, but nervous glances in each direction showed no difference in the behavior of the kids.

Fighting the counterproductive urge to get this over with as quickly as possible, he deliberately focused his mind on each step he was making. He was perfectly aware that any number of things could go wrong: stepping on an unseen twig, or tripping over a rock, or even something as uncontrollable as scattered moonlight glinting off his frame and into the eyes of some poor kid.

Nonetheless, he and Jinx arrived at the bridge without incident, though Cyborg had to keep reminding himself that the normal sound of the stream would cover any sound of the grass or dirt beneath his feet. Crossing the bridge was a more questionable matter, as the wooden planks made more noticeable sounds, but once again the patrolling kids continued about their business in the distance, with not even a long pause to suggest they may have heard something.

While the kids being on the far half of the park was helpful for crossing the bridge, that far half of the park was _also_ the exit out of the park. There were two large trees, with wide trunks, a short ways ahead; Cyborg chose that as the next destination. He walked slowly, trying to keep himself in the shadow of the tree on the right. After glancing around to see if the coast was clear, and seeing nothing but an eerily silent Jinx, he stepped around the edge of the tree to see where the kids were on their patrol route.

Instead, he saw a large pumpkin raise itself up from the ground to float in front of his face, vines dangling.

For a split second, the thing just stood—or more accurately, hovered—there. Then it floated off to the side without so much as swinging a vine at him, much to Cyborg's surprise.

The surprise was almost enough for him to miss the quadruped charging at him. Almost. He swung a fist at the aggressor to keep it off guard while he evaluated the situation further. It responded by rearing up on its hind legs, reaching as high as Cyborg's own height, before lunging forward with a paw. The display had given Cyborg time to ready another punch to intercept the attack, and the force of the impact knocked the thing back a couple feet.

Cyborg finally had a chance to get a good look at the thing. Its shape was distinctly ursine, but it was like no bear he'd ever seen. For one thing, most animals produce heat; this one was "dark" in his thermograph. Even that pumpkin produced a noticeable "glow" in his thermal view. His organic eye picked up that its fur bore a texture more in line with bristles than with actual fur, each rigid black fiber bearing a silver tip.

The bear thing didn't stay still for long. It lunged forward with a deep, reverberating growl; its claw ripping into the outer surface of Cyborg's framework. With another forceful step forward it tried to topple him; however it had no hope against Cyborg's considerable mass. Its momentum nullified, it set its hind legs against the ground and tried to push Cyborg over with musculature. This was slightly more effective, until Cyborg rotated his chest and the thing slid off against the now-angled body.

Cyborg's smirk was extremely short-lived; instead of hitting the grass flat, the bear rammed its front paws against the ground with enough force to propel back to a standing position. He wasn't surprised enough to forgo the opportunity for another punch; this one added to the motion and knocked the thing over backwards. As soon as it hit the ground with a satisfying thump, it quickly rolled over and pushed itself back to a standing position; meanwhile Cyborg was stepping back, as he readied his sonic cannon.

Both sets of eyes were drawn to an abrupt set of purple flashes, which quickly lead to a splattering of bloody pumpkin pulp. Cyborg had almost forgotten about the pumpkin floating there, and was glad that Jinx had made it into a non-issue.

The bear, meanwhile, roared in her general direction, before turning to face her with both hind paws together and stretching its front paws to either side of it. This ritualized movement was quickly followed by a high hiss, and some sort of ball that managed to glow _black_ streaked away from its chest. It impacted Jinx's midsection, and she screamed in pain as her limbs visibly stiffened before she unceremoniously toppled to the ground, her face contorted in agony.

Then it turned back to Cyborg.

* * *

One does not last long at the H.I.V.E. Academy without having, or acquiring, a tolerance of pain. It was simply that type of environment, where every mistake was another bludgeon and a success might simply hurt _less_.

Nonetheless, Jinx was wholly unprepared for the sudden conflagration of agony that was now searing several of her joints from the inside. Gritting her teeth and clenching her eyes shut was all she could do to withstand the torment; the instinctive scream had been utterly useless in that regard, and tactically unsound besides.

One ear dimly noted sounds of Cyborg's sonic cannon firing, over the sound of painful pressure that flooded her hearing. The other picked up low vibrations of footfalls, more through tactile means than auditory. She eventually realized that Cyborg was the only thing keeping that damned ursine...thing...from flaying or fileting her.

Unhappy with her odds, she clenched her teeth with firm determination as she slowly forced herself off the ground with one arm. Her fingers and wrist moved freely, and she could feel the cool blades of moist grass against her palm. The elbow and shoulder, however, resisted the slow movements. Until enough pressure was applied and the joints jerked in the desired direction, and the relatively dull heat in them flared up to volcanic again with a pair of sickening creaks.

The short whimper sounded pathetic to her own ears, despite being muffled by the altercation taking place far too close for her liking. She held firm in spite of the instinct to recoil, on the assumption that letting her arm drop back down an inch would be just as painful as getting it where it was. A few seconds and a couple deep breaths later, the pain had reduced enough that she could think somewhat clearly.

In what may not have been the most thought-out move, she shoved her hand against the ground with all the might she could muster. While she had expected it to hurt horribly, she wasn't prepared for the sound of _cracking_ coming from her joints and sending gruesome vibrations throughout the surrounding muscle. She was unaware of anything outside her own body for the next several seconds.

When she finally opened her eyes, quite thankful that her neck wasn't affected by the same malady as her elbow and shoulder, she saw that she'd done it: She had gotten off of the ground enough to look around. The rigid position of her arm and elbow was far from comfortable, but there was no sign of any sort of breakage, and compared to what her shoulder had just gone through she was hardly bothered by ordinary muscle strain.

What bothered her was that Cyborg wasn't doing well. She didn't need Cyborg's infrared eye to see the many spots where his metal surface had been torn into. Nor to notice that the bear creature was agile enough to evade Cyborg's wide swings, and that it stayed close enough to keep him from aiming his sonic cannon at it. A rather impressive set of feats, but this wasn't the time for a performance appraisal.

Breathing heavily, partly to recover from all the exertion but mostly because the feel of cool moist air in her lungs was the most pleasant thing she'd come across all damn night, she took a couple seconds to evaluate her options. Cyborg's endurance was significant but not unlimited, and she'd be in no state to defend herself if he was felled by attrition. The time concern cut off most of her options, her own severely reduced mobility cut off the rest...

Suddenly it dawned on her. She flexed her fingers, with no ill effects. Then, with a deep breath, she turned her open palm against the ground, turned her hand onto its side without any significant movement to her elbow. And she waited for the right moment, trying not to be distracted by the much smaller portion of her palm supporting the same amount of weight.

Cyborg, likely suspecting he'd gotten predictable, suddenly changed his routine of horizontal swings with an uppercut. The bear straightened to its full height and leaned back slightly, dodging Cyborg's blow. Snarling, it raised a claw above its head, preparing a vertical strike of its own.

That was Jinx's cue. With a hiss, she quickly flattened her palm against the ground, not needing to guess why the grass was briefly lit with a violet glow. The bear's snarl ended with a yelp as the ground under its feet suddenly collapsed a couple of inches, and it flailed its paws around to maintain its balance. Its limbs so occupied, it had no chance to defend against Cyborg's point-blank cannon shot.

Whatever the bear thing actually _was_, it separated into a cloud of short shadowy strands, as though Cyborg's attack had instantly destroyed what was holding it together and sent the remnants flying. Jinx didn't see much more, as the dull heat in her joints abruptly turned into a frigid chill and she collapsed back to the ground. She couldn't miss the _sound_, though: a loud growl echoing all around, somewhat higher pitched than the thing's previous noises, slowly fading into silence over the course of several seconds.

She was discovering that the pain in her joints was now gone, when Cyborg ran up to her.

"Yo, what was—Are you OK?" he cut himself off as he offered a hand to help her up.

The scene reminded her of a similar one with "Stone" back at the H.I.V.E. Academy, but although she was sure she was _supposed_ to be mad, she found that she wasn't. Still, she got back on her feet without his help, primarily so she could find the answer to his question for herself.

"Apparently," she said while exaggerating the action of stretching her arms; perfectly normal response on the part of her elbows. "I don't get _why_, but I'm not complaining. What happened after you destroyed it, I didn't see."

"Umm...all its hair blow away, but it like faded out of existence instead of making a mess on the ground. Do _you_ have any idea what that thing was, or how it could be bossed around by a pumpkin?"

"How the _hell_ would I—No. I don't remember reading about anything like it. Hell, I don't even know enough about it to _try_ researching it." She arched an eyebrow. "Why do you think it was being ordered around, anyway?"

"The pumpkin was right in front of me, then it just floated off so the bear thing could attack. The muscle's usually the one _given_ orders, right? Can't imagine Mammoth ever bossing _you_ around."

"Makes sense." It'd been _years_ since Mammoth learned better than to try.

Her attention was instantly drawn by the sound of a deep bark echoing through the line of trees marking the park's edge. It was loud enough that she was sure its source would be nearby, but it _sounded_ far away; there was no recognizable difference in how the sound hit each ear, the way it would be if it were remotely close. It also didn't sound _canine_, it sounded...a lot like that bear thing's roar, though with a lower pitch.

Cyborg quickly starting interacting with something on his arm, a bewildered look in his eye. "Did _you_ hear that," he asked, "'cause my sonic analyzer is telling me I'm hearing things."

She was about to answer in the affirmative when _another_ bark rang out. This one came from the side, but it was still too far to be close, and its pitch was similar to the last one, but varying in subtle ways. Like distinct voices. She looked in its direction, but didn't see anything as far as the fog let her see.

Cyborg started pressing buttons on his arm frantically. "Yeah that! My _ears_ are hearing it just fine, but my analyzer only caught silence. It's picking up my voice just fine, so it ain't broke..."

But her mind was distracted by the implications of the fog. "Where are those kids?"

"What?" he exclaimed as he looked all around, presumably probing the fog with his thermal vision. "They're...just standing there, on the road." he stated with some disbelief.

"So the kids are being bossed around too."

Whatever Cyborg was about to say in response, he was preempted by a repeat of the first bark.

Jinx shook her head. "_Whatever's_ going on, standing here isn't going to help if they're still here. We need to get moving."

The second bark came again, and Cyborg straightened his posture. "Looks like they agree, the kids are coming towards us." Cyborg said with slight nervousness.

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "Then lead on." He was still the one with who could see farthest through fog. "No use sneaking if they already know where we are."

"Good point," Cyborg agreed as he broke off into a run. "We can't hide, but we can sure outrun 'em."

"Works for me," she replied as she followed, quite pleased that the fiasco hadn't done any long-term damage to her mobility.


	8. Chapter 8

"Gotta be honest," Cyborg said, "It still doesn't feel right to be breaking and entering like this."

Never mind that the corner store was abandoned other than Jinx and himself. Or that this small employee break room on the second floor offered views of both streets through its windows. Or that they'd managed to get away from those zombie kids by coming in. It just felt wrong; he was supposed to be _preventing_ burglaries, not _committing_ them.

Jinx sighed. "I'm sure Mammoth would've seen things differently, but sneaking around a convenience store isn't _my_ idea of a good time either. But if it'll make you feel better, ring up a frappucino or something before we leave; I'm sure the markup'll more than cover the cost of the zero damage we caused."

Cyborg shook his head, rather displeased that his empty stomach perked up at the thought. Although coffee wasn't really its thing, it would want something like pretzels.

Trying to get his mind off of it, he considered that Jinx _did_ have sort of a point; since they didn't do any damage getting in the unlocked door and didn't have any intentions of committing any crimes inside, they could conceivably be construed as not breaking, though still entering. Maybe. His stomach was still tight with nervousness though, believing he was just trying to convince himself with a really flimsy excuse. On some level, he wished he could disregard proper civilized behavior in lieu of survival as easily as Jinx had.

But he figured that would be only a short step away from ignoring the law whenever it was inconvenient. And then he'd be no better than Brother Blood, Slade, or any of the myriad _other_ villains that inexplicably choose this particular city out of the entire west coast to wreak havoc on. He realized he wasn't even that comfortable with Jinx's restrained version of the same behavior, but he didn't want to get himself killed any more than she did.

Not that this was the best time for philosophy.

The lights were on in the main area of the store. Small shelves stocked with colorful snack food bags, canned beverages in transparent refrigeration units built into the walls. Some of which were now calling Cyborg's stomach with the promise of sugary or salty deliciousness.

But where he and Jinx were now, up the stairway marked with a sign that read "employees only", the lights were off. Not that either of them were impeded in any way; between the moonlight wafting in the two windows and the light making its way up the straight stairway, there was plenty of light for those accustomed to negligible lighting. Even if that wasn't the case, he wouldn't need to rely on his thermograph; his long-installed night vision mode would be fine outside from the fog.

What was on the _inside_ of the building wasn't the important part, of course. Cyborg turned to look out the nearby window. Over the several minutes and several blocks since getting away from the park, the fog had grown more sparse; and Cyborg could almost make out the subtle concrete texture of the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street with his organic eye. The street lights did an excellent job of highlighting shambling children, who showed no aversion to walking directly under the illuminating gaze.

About half a dozen children were walking up and down both sides of the street, hardly a quarter of how many they'd seen when Cyborg and Jinx first got up here. There was one in a skeleton costume, a devil with a plastic pitchfork, a ghost with too many eye holes, an eerily convincing zombie, and a ghost with a jack-o-lantern head. Closer examination of that last one revealed a poorly concealed human neck, confirming that it _was_ a kid in a costume, and not some smaller pumpkin monster.

"Think it's safe here?" Cyborg asked Jinx in the interests of getting a second opinion.

"For now," she half-whispered from the other window. "The kids've all stuck to the streets so far."

"Not that I'm complaining, but that's kind of weird."

"A little, yeah," she agreed. "Haven't seen any cars with shattered windshields or anything either, I'd have expected wanton destruction of some variety with mind control victims. And the only building they've even _tried_ to enter that I've seen, is that warehouse they chased you into."

He restrained his indignation at having been chased anywhere. She was right, though; all the streets he'd gone down when the whole fiasco started, and all the city blocks they'd _just_ gone past, and none of the buildings had looked unexpectedly damaged. A couple of them had been _decorated_ as if they were in various states of abandonment, it being Halloween and all, but there was no genuine structural damage that he could recall. Except at the warehouse, when he'd mangled the door to keep the kids out, and when the flying pumpkin came crashing through the skylight. The flying pumpkin...

"And that's when they brought in the pumpkin," he shared his revelation. "Guess that's the strike team."

"Then the kids would be a detection grid," Jinx added to the chain of thought, "and pumpkins follow up when they find something. But where do those bear...things...come in? The _giant_ pumpkins are physical powerhouses, I can't imagine those bears being any better at it."

He thought about it for a bit. She wasn't in much of a condition to analyze the thing while he was fighting it, after all. "Maybe...they're some kind of specialists?" he suggested. "Have to assume they were communicating with that weird bark thing, and that one..." He paused for a split second, trying to figure out how to phrase it in a way that wouldn't tick her off. "Well it _did_ prove able to incapacitate someone."

He looked in her direction in case she had reacted poorly, but if she had a visible reaction he must've missed it. "Maybe..." she started.

Then he saw something out on the street, out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head to look at it. "Wait, is that...a _Terra_ costume? _Really?_"

"What?" Jinx said with some surprise as she moved to "his" window to see for herself. "Huh, it is," she said with some detached bemusement, as she placed her left hand against the wall. "Goggles, gloves and all. Who decided to market _that_?"

But Cyborg was distracted. The position of Jinx's arm revealed a conspicuous tear on her sleeve that he hadn't noticed before, its jagged edges of black material surrounding a streak of crimson across her forearm. "Yo," he exclaimed, "What happened to your arm?"

"What? Oh, " she said while turning her head towards him, "flying debris while fighting that pumpkin in the water."

Made sense, that was the only serious fighting she'd been involved in. "When were you gonna tell me?"

"...never," she admitted while turning eyes towards the window.

"Why?", he asked, hoping the confusion in his voice would mask the irritation.

"Because I'm _fine_," she countered, frowning at him. "My arm works just fine, and I can worry long term after we take care of _that_," she said, gesturing towards the window with the arm in question.

He couldn't fault her prioritizing. Still..."Let me see that."

"What? No!" she growled.

"Are _you_ packing sensors for that kind of thing?"

"I can take care of _myself_, I don't need _your_ help."

He was faulting her prioritizing now. "Wouldn't you rather know sooner if there's some sort of pumpkin goo sprouting or something in there?"

She spent a couple seconds slowly glancing between her arm and the window. "_Fine,_" she relented as she stepped forward and held out her arm.

The impatient frown never left her face. As he fired up the scanners in his arm, the back of his mind was trying to determine which was more confusing: her insistence on self-reliance, or that he actually got her to budge on the subject.

"Wound's sealed, nothing odd in there. None of those weird pumpkin compounds, no tetanus toxin, no _other_ toxins I can detect."

"Well since you're there, anything leftover from whatever that bear hit me with?"

He adjusted the scan range to her whole system. "Umm...don't _see_ anything unexpected, but I could be missing trace amounts since I don't know what signature I'm looking for."

She furled an eyebrow as she retracted her arm. "You really didn't scan the bear?"

"I didn't have a chance," he explained in a defensive fashion, "it just fell apart into a cloud of hair that floated into the grass and disappeared! Like it was never there in the first place!"

She looked out the window before answering. "Might've been a conjured creature. Created from nothing, turned back into nothing."

"And maybe _that's_ why my analyzer couldn't hear that barking stuff."

Jinx shrugged. "Could be. But even if all that's true...who's behind all of this?"

A cycle of villains flitted through Cyborg's mind, as he grasped out for ones that seemed likely candidates. First stop, that mass mind controller..."Brother Blood?"

"Doubt it," Jinx replied quickly. "Haven't heard anyone praise his overgrown ego. Slade?"

"Nah. If he was behind this, we'd already be down; he's the type to arrange things _before_ striking, this looks too sloppy. Can't imagine him picking pumpkins over his robots anyway." A fleeting green image flew past in his brainstorm. "Who was that who controlled plants? Poison Ivy or something?"

Jinx had to think about this one for a couple seconds. "Name sounds right...But doesn't she operate out of Gotham City? On the _other_ coast?"

"Hmm, that _seems_ right. Normally I'd check with Robin, if she _did_ work out of there I'm sure he could tell me what she was doing like two weeks and seventeen seconds ago, off the top of his spiky head. But—"

"They could be after the Titans personally," Jinx said with a trace of excited revelation. "I mean, after I left Starfire they didn't follow me, we established that they got to Raven _somehow_, and the only time the kids went up against a building was when they were after _you_."

While he heard every word she said, his first thought wasn't along the same lines. "Oh man, been so caught up in _us_ staying alive I totally forgot about saving all of _them_! We've gotta get going right now—"

"And _then_ what?" she interrupted with. "We're not going to save them if we get caught too. And that's what'll happen if we keep running around without any direction. As long as we're here waiting for the patrols to thin out, we may as well try to figure out _something_ that'll help us going forward."

Phrased like that, Cyborg found he couldn't dispute what she was saying. However much he'd like to. "Alright. So assuming that whatever's behind this _is_ after the Titans personally...It'd probably be someone the Titans have dealt with, or at least someone local that's been affected by us. Probably rules out Poison Ivy, don't think any of the Titans have been there, but I can't think of any other plant-themed villains."

"How about mind-controlling ones, then?" Jinx responded as she slowly walked back to 'her' window.

"Good point." He thought about creepy mind-controllers for only a moment. "The Puppet King?"

She turned, and lowered an eyebrow. "Who?"

"Umm..." He struggled to think of how to describe him succinctly. "Psycho body-stealing marionette?" Close enough.

"Not ringing any bells," she said as she shook her head.

"Huh," Cyborg said with minor bewilderment, "thought he was part of that free-for-all with the Brotherhood of Evil."

She scoffed softly. "In case you forgot, I got there late _and_ it was a chaotic mess; I don't remember everything that was were." She turned back toward the window. "Besides, shouldn't he be frozen then?"

"You're probably right. What about...Mother Mae-Eye?"

Jinx's posture subtly straightened, before she half turned to Cyborg. "What?" He wasn't entirely sure that was a question, her tone was rather low.

"Uhh...Psycho pie-enchanting witch?"

She took a deep breath, then turned the rest of the way to face him. "Are you thinking, like, _pumpkin_ pie?"

"No. I mean yes!" he suddenly exclaimed as his mind caught up with him. "Mind-controlling pumpkin pie is the closest connection we've come up with, isn't it?"

"A very _hypothetical_ connection," she intoned skeptically, "but sure. Looks too gloomy out there though. I'd have expected grinning suns and gingerbread buildings and other nauseating cuteness if she was behind this."

"Yeah, you're right. Wait...how did you know so much about her?" He remembered..._something_ to do with her. He remembered that he was in a cherry-filled-pastry haze for most of that fiasco, and found his recollection foggier than the streets outside. Even so, a distressful feeling in his stomach told him he should be able to remember something about it, that was _really_ important right now.

Ignoring the question, Jinx crossed her arms and asked, with a slightly threatening tone, "What'd you do with her after you guys trapped her in a pie?"

"We gave the pie to the H.I..." _Oh yeah. __**That.**_ "...I-I mean _Robin_ gave the—"

"**YOU **_**BASTARDS,**_" she hissed, before growling and turning to stare out the window.

Cyborg couldn't blame her. In retrospect, it seemed unusually irresponsible of Robin to send the problem on to someone else. And Cyborg would be at _least_ as ticked off if they had to deal with Mother Mae-Eye _again_ because the H.I.V.E. Five couldn't handle it.

"Is that _blood_?" Jinx abruptly asked, still staring out the window.

His sense of self-preservation momentarily overridden by the possibility of more significant matters, he quickly walked over to the same window.

Didn't take much time to make out the red splatters on several of kids shambling by. "Sure looks that way, yeah."

"Don't suppose you can tell if that's _real_ blood, and not the costume stuff?"

With a pane of glass in the way, he wasn't going to get anything useful from his scanners. However, it didn't take long for him to notice all of the splattered kids were coming from the same direction, heading left to right from the window's perspective. And from the shape of the little trails, all of the splattered originated from the side of them he couldn't see; none of the kids facing the other direction had anything to match.

"No," he answered, "but they're all coming from the same direction, and all splattered in the same place. Doubt they were coordinated before _and_ after the nightmare hit."

She sighed. "I suppose we're obligated to figure out where all this blood is coming from, in case someone needs saving."

"That's usually how it goes, yeah."

"Fine," she said as she turned towards the stairs, "let's go."

Cyborg wordlessly complied.

Jinx went on, "That was really _Robin's_ best idea?"

"Oh yeah. I wanted to eat it."

"Funny, that's exactly what Mammoth said."

"..._ow_." Somehow, that was more painful than Starfire's generous application of a rolling pin to his head had been.

* * *

"I have a whole new appreciation for all that roof-hopping Robin does," Cyborg commented between breaths.

"Yeah," Jinx agreed, "we just make it _look_ ridiculously easy." Robin _did _have a gift for looking ridiculous, after all. She was just inordinately talented.

They'd gotten here through a fairly consistent cycle: Jinx traversed three buildings rooftop-to-rooftop, then scoped out the streets for thirty seconds while Cyborg caught up to her. Three minutes later, she had found the likely source of what they were looking for.

"Looks like that grocery store straight across the street is it," she explained. "Kids to the right of it have those weird stains, kids to the left don't. Then there's the big hole in the window, with crushed glass fragments and...some kind of red pulp...near it on the sidewalk."

Cyborg put a hand to his head as he looked over the edge of the roof. "Huh. There's some fluid all over that slab of sidewalk too, but it doesn't look like blood. It's all real transparent, almost like water."

"Weird," Jinx replied. That would strongly suggest that the red stuff wasn't flesh...but then, what _would_ it be?

"I guess this puts a hole in the theory about the main Titans being the target, if the kids broke in there," Cyborg commented. "Unless one of the others was in there."

"I don't think so. The glass pieces are on the _outside, _which means the window was broken from the _inside_."

"...so somebody broke _out_ of the building, rather than them breaking in."

"Yeah. Not the most thought-out plan in..." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a kid nearing the site in question window, approaching it from the left. "Shh," she whispered, crouching for emphasis. Cyborg followed suit.

This particular boy wasn't wearing a costume, although Jinx supposed it was _possible_ that the combination of black leather jacket, white t-shirt, jeans and sneakers was meant to evoke a particular person. What concerned her more than the light-blue glow in the eyes, however, was the mostly correct proportions of the body. This wasn't the shape of a twelve-year-old, this was someone close to her own age.

While she never held a belief that simple postpubescence would confer some sort of immunity, the concrete example revealed some disconcerting implications to her mind. First and foremost her _own_ vulnerability; she'd taken enough mental crap from Brother Blood, she didn't need another variety of shit to deal with. Secondly the _other_ potential victims; up until now she'd been assuming Starfire, Raven and the rest of the city's superpowered demographic had been pinned, captured or otherwise incapacitated. The prospect of fighting them all was...disheartening, at the very least.

Still, she found the implications changed nothing at the moment. While a "zombie Starfire" would certainly be more of an issue than any number of roving tweens,there was unlikely to be any advance warning one way or the other. She'd worry about it _then_, for _now_ there were addressable issues to deal with.

Patiently they watched. The teenager shambled forward listlessly, unlike the slightly more aggressive pacing of the kids who'd tried to chase them down. If he was capable of reacting to the sound of glass pieces crunching underfoot, he didn't do so.

As he crossed the middle of the gap in the window, a muffled sound of metal hitting linoleum came out of the window. A split second later, the sound was replaced with a couple of squishy splatters; tiny pieces sprayed from his side and a spheroid of some sort flew past him entirely, producing its own squish against the building directly beneath them.

Without so much as hesitating in his stride, he deliberately craned his neck to look through the window opening for a second, before returning his head to its forward-facing position. He continued to walk on, whether oblivious or uncaring.

Jinx shook her head. "What the hell was that?"

"You're telling _me_," Cyborg responded.

"No, seriously," Jinx said as she leaned her head over the edge of the roof. "What the hell was _that_?" she asked, indicating the splatter below with her hand. The poor lighting, three-story height difference and restrictive angle were enough to mask any sort of visual details; despite the fog thinning out. "Is it the same stuff?"

"Looks like," Cyborg confirmed as he looked down over the edge. "Could do an analysis on it, but...We need to save whoever or figure out whatever didn't need saving first."

"Fine, let's go."

"So," he asked with a little trepidation, "how are we getting across the street? It's like eight lanes wide, with no place to hide, and with the fog lifting it won't take more than a handful of kids to spot us crossing."

"Then we'll have to get them to look _elsewhere_," she answered. It was sounding suspiciously like he was the only one needing help here.

"A distraction? How're we gonna set up a distraction far enough away that they don't just run right where we are?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I'm all for skipping it and moving on, personally; but I don't see how else you're going to get across the street, unless you want to go underground again."

He shuttered. "Oh no, had enough of that for the day."

He missed the cue to have her go across by herself. Good, that saved her the tedium of refusing. "Well then." She evaluated the street once more, this time keeping an eye out for objects of a conveniently destructible nature.

The pavement that comprised the street wasn't appealing, nor were the sidewalks or all the sturdy-looking buildings. She could make a noticeable display out of them, certainly, but it'd take too long for the full effect. She needed something quicker. Flashier. More explosive.

Something like...cars. There were only nine of them as far as she could see, but that was more than enough. "Is there anyone in any of those cars I see?"

"Huh?" Cyborg asked, briefly thrown off-guard by the sudden question, before doing something with his arm. "Can't find anything like that, only signs of movement are a couple kids. Why?"

"Anyone in our mystery building?" she asked, ignoring the question since she was sure he'd have an issue with the answer.

"I think so, there's _something_ in that direction but I can't pinpoint it."

"Anyone below?" she prompted before he could ask again.

"No. Now you want to tell me what this is all about?"

In response, she drew her communicator and turned it on. "This thing still work?" she said into the device.

Cyborg lowered his eyebrow, before answering over his built-in communication equipment, that'd been configured to work directly with her own communicator and bypass the city-wide interference. "Umm, _yeah,_" he said, his annoyance coming through.

"Good. You get to the front door under here, let me know when you're there and the coast is reasonably clear. I'll tell you when to run across; leave the diversion to me."

He paused for a second. "You're gonna blow up the cars, aren't ya?"

"Yep."

He sighed and shook his head, before turning around and walking towards what seemed to be a fire escape. "Can't believe I'm doing this," he muttered.

"Good thing _you're_ not the one doing it, then," she retorted. "You know, for someone who's swung entire buildings around, you're sure picky about property damage."

While Cyborg climbed, shimmied or otherwise made his way down, Jinx mentally determined the optimum targets. The two criteria were pretty basic, the first being four cars: Two on this side of the street, two on the other; and of each two, one on her left and one on her right. That would ensure the light and sound of the explosions would interfere with detecting Cyborg from all directions as he crossed the street, if timed properly.

The other criterion was to maximize difference of distance from cars to the left and cars to the right. A search party would likely start from the middle, so offsetting the middle from their actual location would buy them extra time.

Cyborg's voice came over her communicator. "So how are _you_ going to get across from up there?"

Not worrying about him seeing her before she responded, she rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Don't worry about me," she said, "worry about the kids that'll get blown to bits if you miscall this."

"Fine," he sighed. "So what's the plan?"

"You give the word, I'll give a countdown," she said as she walked to the far end of the roof. "Time's up, you charge across the street and through the window. I'll handle the diversion and back you up."

"You sure that'll...Wait. OK, all clear."

She turned on her heel. "Eight seconds," she said as she tensed her muscles and readied her sprint. "Seven. Six. Five, count the rest, four."

In a smooth motion she stowed the communicator and launched herself across the roof. One second later, she launched herself through the air.  
A third of the way across the many lanes of concrete below, she crossed her arms, tossing a pair of hexes at the nearest of her targets. Not a second later, she spread her arms out, throwing another set of hexes at the remaining targets.

She casually alighted on the edge of the store's roof as the sounds of four scattered explosions roared around her, following by a set of overlapping car alarms. A look around and down at the street below showed Cyborg dutifully charging across the street, taking advantage of the obscuring pillars of smoke she'd graciously provided. A simple hop down off the roof, and she was on the street, in position to follow Cyborg in as he squeezed through the hole in the window.

She was dismayed when Cyborg's plan was more along of the lines of smashing through an adjacent window. She shook her head and followed him in. She'd just have to hope the extra hole wouldn't draw extra attention when the inevitable search team came around...and possibly berate Cyborg over his poor grasp of stealth when this was all over.


	9. Chapter 9

"_You?_"

Jinx came through the shattered window just in time to see Cyborg thrust an accusing finger at what appeared, for a split second, to be a misshapen mass of disheveled flesh.

"You!...and you?" Control Freak responded in kind, indicating both Cyborg and Jinx.

She quickly glanced around. Control Freak, who for practical purposes _could_ be considered a misshapen mass of disheveled flesh, was between two metal store shelves, behind an empty coffee canister that was connected to the shelves with a total of four thick elastic bands. At present the bands were holding the loose container a couple feet off the floor. Surrounding him was a pile of red produce...

"You were catapulting _tomatoes_ at the kids walking by?" That wasn't a particularly sensical conclusion, but it did combine all the visible elements and nonsensical _was _his shtick.

"Well...yeah," he stammered.

The sounds of the car alarms weren't _as_ loud inside the building, but they were still noticeable. It was enough to remind her that company could be walking by any moment. "First things first, we need to get away from here."

"Alright," Cyborg said with some glee as he cracked his knuckles, "Time to take the 'professor' here and plug him into the back."

Control Freak's eyes widened at the sight of a charging Cyborg. "Now wait just AAAAH!"

Cyborg was carrying him as easily as Private H.I.V.E. carted his own shield around. Jinx kept pace behind them. At the back wall, on the opposite end of the store as the windows, Cyborg dropped Control Freak unceremoniously.

Control Freak hit the floor with a grunt. "So where's the hyperdrive, _Wookie_?" he sarcastically demanded as he rubbed his head.

"Don't we have something _better_ to do?" Jinx cut in, addressing Cyborg.

"Hmm...well Wookies _are_ known for tearing people's arms out of their sockets..."

"_Ha!_" Control Freak exclaimed, jumping to his feet. "You expect me to _let the Wookie win_? I'll have you know that Wookie arm removal is temporary, Pekt for example was only—"

"I think you're missing something," Cyborg interrupted with raised voice. "By 'Wookie' I mean _me,_ and by 'people's arms' I mean _yours_."

Jinx rolled her eyes, and creased an eyebrow. "Nerds," she muttered under her breath and made a fist with her right hand, rubbing the length of her curled forefinger with her thumb.

Control Freak apparently hadn't been paying attention. "I guess I'd have to be a Trandoshan to rely on growing a new set of arms. Guess I'll have to pull out the old standby!" he exclaimed as he brandished a remote control, drawn from some disgusting recess in his coat.

Having expected the device to appear ever since she first identified Control Freak, she wasted no time throwing a hex at it. Scraps of sparking electronics fell out of his hand and disintegrated. He gasped in shock.

"My remote!" he yelled, before kneeling and scooping up two handfuls of dust and metal fragments off the floor. "My..._precious,_" he sobbed.

Jinx readied herself for throwing another hex, just in case Control Freak carted around spare remotes. Cyborg, meanwhile, worked something or other on his arm. "Huh," he said, "jamming hasn't stopped."

"_DUH!_" Control Freak shouted angrily as he jumped to his feet. "My remote didn't create those radio-jamming pumpkins _or_ whatever else is out there!" He then pointed an accusatory finger and Jinx. "Premeditated killing of an innocent is _murder_, you know!"

While she was positive that murder charges wouldn't apply to the destruction of inanimate objects, that wasn't the part of his complaint she was thinking about. It didn't escape Cyborg's notice, either.

"_Radio-jamming _pumpkins?" they said at the same time, quickly followed by giving each other skeptical glances in unison.

"Huh?" Control Freak uttered, as turned his head towards the two of them with a worried look.

She took the opportunity to use one of the smug smiles she'd spent years perfecting. "Now why do you suppose he'd know something like _that?_" she menaced, dropping the smile to an angry stare on the last word.

"_Wait!_" he pleaded. "What do you _want_?"

Cyborg folded his arms. "How about turning off the Halloween zombie flick?"

"You think _I_ directed this? Why would you automatically cast me as the playwright?"

"Halloween? Zombie flick?"

"With _pumpkins_? Are you accusing _me_ of producing some kind of **remake**? Besides, if _I_ wrote this I'd be hanging out at the Tower after Robin and Beast Boy were—"

His sentence cut off as Cyborg lunged forward, pinning Control Freak's neck to the wall with his forearm. "_How would you know what happened to them unless you _did_ it,_" Cyborg yelled.

Control Freak's eyes were on the verge of popping out of their sockets as he frantically responded. "_I was trailing Robin and he was here and I heard him call Beast Boy and then he started yelling for Beast Boy to answer more then this green tentacle thing dragged him off and I thought it was Beast Boy pulling a prank 'cause I didn't see anything out there when I looked and Robin would still be fighting after a few seconds alright?_"

Cyborg glared for a couple seconds, then stepped back. Control Freak slid to the floor, trying to catch his breath, as Jinx tried to remember if 'Stone' had taken any interrogation classes back at the H.I.V.E. Academy.

A few seconds of deep breathing on Control Freak's part later, and she was no closer to a recollection. But having decided not to let his stress subside entirely... "Radio-jamming pumpkins. _Talk,_" she commanded.

"My prototype was stolen, _OK?_ I was gonna sneak it around Radar Shed to jam their door and merchandise, their 'in-store credit only' return policy _sucks_...But back in August someone grabbed the gourd, hydroponic pod and all."

Cyborg raised an eyebrow. "And you couldn't have made another one because...?"

"I'd started growing that one in _March_ so it'd be ready this month, I didn't have _time_ to start over! Can't just make it with special effects; if it gets a wild fiber up its core it'd jam itself into a regular pumpkin."

"Who took it?" Cyborg asked.

Control Freak scoffed. "If I knew _that_ we would be in an _alternate_ ending right now."

"Know anything about the bears?"

Control Freak furled an eyebrow, puzzled. "Bears? _What_ bears?"

Jinx sighed. "Guess they're _very _scarce. What about the kids?"

"The zombies? They haven't even _tried_ to get in here, they're staying on the streets. Don't know who's pulling the strings, but that's scripted behavior; that script had to be written."

Cyborg coughed. "So why are you _here_?" he asked.

"And what's with the tomatoes?" Jinx added.

"After Robin disappeared, I fell back to reassess the situation, devise and enact a brilliant plan the likes of which the universe would never—"

He stopped, as Cyborg and Jinx stared at him with skeptical frowns.

"OK so I was in the _bathroom_," he admitted with some frustration. "All that candy was very low in fiber and—"

"_**TOMATOES,**_" Jinx hissed with a scowl, hoping to avoid a tale of intestinal woe.

"ALRIGHT!" he yelled in response. "I heard glass breaking and someone yelling about zombies while I was in the bathroom, and when I got out the lights were off, the aisles abandoned and there was that hole in the window. My remote was hampered by the jamming—_though it was working __better than it is now—_so I couldn't teleport out, and walking right into the middle of things seemed like a bad idea, so...I set up a makeshift catapult using a giant can of spaghetti sauce and a lot of tomatoes from the produce section."

"_That_ was your plan?" Jinx incredulously asked. It sounded like something Billy Numerous would've come up with.

He frowned at her. "Well I was _gonna_ back it up with avocados or salt or something when they came in, hoping to knock them over and I'd get out while they were down...but they never did. Not even when I forgot to fire a salvo, they just kept walking past. Then it was just passing time."

She sighed. "Well _this_ was a waste of time." She turned her head to address Cyborg. "If they're really after _you_, leaving him behind will be safest," she said as she turned to walk away.

"_WAIT!_"Control Freak yelled, as he fell forward and grabbed Cyborg's left leg, wobbling slightly as his sizable belly vibrated from landing on the floor. "You can't leave me here!"

Jinx looked back. If he wasn't interested in his own safety, the least she could do was oblige him and hopefully find some way to use it to her advantage. "Well if you insist on coming along—"

"_No_," he countered, "You can go get eaten or whatever. But _he_ has to stay here."

Cyborg blinked. "I'm sure I'll regret asking this, but...why?"

Control Freak looked up with an incredulous stare. "Because of the most _important_ rule of zombie movies!"

"Which _is...?_" Jinx cut in impatiently.

He cleared his throat and closed his eyes, and attempted to sound dignified. "To survive a zombie outbreak, keep a big black guy close at all times."

Jinx silently lowered a disapproving eyebrow, deciding that Control Freak's self-proclaimed title of "ruler of reality" was firmly rooted in his less-than-firm grasp of the _concept_ of reality.

Cyborg's response was lacking in silence. "Say _what?_" he yelled indignantly.

"Hey," Control Freak responded in kind, "I didn't _make_ the rule! That's just how it is, it's been that way in every Romero classic dating all the way back to the original Night of the Living Dead in 1968!"

"_Why you—_" Cyborg started, before his irateness paused as he contemplated the claim. "...Huh. I never looked at it like that before, but come to think of it...you're actually _right_. Didn't see _that_ coming."

Jinx groaned and rolled her eyes. "I'm thinking about writing a screenplay myself after this, about the two of you. I think I'll call it..._Cult of the Damned Imbeciles,_" she growled.

"Ooh, nice title play," was Control Freak's somewhat impressed reply.

Her response was preempted by a loud crash and a flood of drywall clouding the air. She instinctively hopped away from the source of the noise; while Cyborg took a couple steps back, dragging Control Freak with him.

The dust settled, revealing a new hole in the exterior wall and an exceptionally tall, highly muscled man now on the inside. A man Jinx knew all too well, although the blue glowing eyes would be a new feature for Mammoth.

"Cyborg," he uttered with the same monotone as the kids who'd chased Cyborg to that warehouse, though Mammoth's gruff voice was quite a bit louder. If the reinforcements weren't already here, they'd be coming for sure now.

Cyborg took another couple steps back. "Wait a minute," he said with what sounded like dawning comprehension. "This isn't a _remake_...**It's a deconstruction!**"

Control Freak's shrill cry further punctured the already broken silence, as he jumped to his feet and ran away at his top speed, flailing his arms wildly.

There was no time for Jinx to either derive amusement from the spectacle or guess where he thought he was going to go; Mammoth stepped forward and effortlessly backhanded Cyborg away to the side, then raised his arms above his head and executed a vicious two-fisted smash to the floor she occupied.

She dodged out of the way of the overt move, but the force hitting the floor produced a circular eruption that threw her and several large chunks of tile into the air. Her quickly improvised plan to land on her feet was just as quickly thwarted, as she slammed into the top of a multi-level shelf. The shelf itself toppled shortly thereafter; if the clinking was any indication, the now-ground-facing shelves primarily held glass jars.

"_Shit_," she muttered to herself as she extricated herself from several shelves. Zombie Mammoth had proven stronger than normal Mammoth, and Mammoth already had rather prodigious strength. Worse, she couldn't fight him. Not so much because he'd been a friend of sorts for a long time, but because defeating Mammoth would be a battle of attrition, and she didn't have any time to spare with gigantic pumpkins possibly showing up any second now.

She jumped off of the overturned stack of shelves just before the entire assembly was yanked out of the way by Mammoth's overdeveloped musculature. She immediately pounced to the top of another shelf, a task made more difficult as his failed attempt to plow her over with his new handheld implement smashed through the base of her destination, tearing a chunk out of its support.

Her landing was accompanied with the creak of metal straining under the weight it was intended to support, and the horrid squeak of the top shelf bending to absorb the inertia of her landing. A lesser acrobat would have immediately fallen off a landing on a collapsing platform; Jinx managed to maintain her balance on the shifting surface for the split second it took to take a straight leap across the aisle.

The yielding of the shelf platform mitigated the jumping height, and Jinx found herself careening directly towards the _edge_ of top shelf, rather than arcing to the clear spot she'd intended to land on. Gritting her teeth, she raised her right leg up to shoulder height. A split second later she rammed it down against the inside edge of the top shelf, pivoting her entire body around the back edge of her heel as she bent her knee. As the rotary motion started taking her over the top of the shelf, she lifted her left leg to clear the edge, arched her back and stretched her arms behind her.

Trying not to be distracted by the inverted view behind her, specifically the sight of Mammoth wielding that mangled multi-level shelf as easily as she might hold a painting, she adjusted to the slowing momentum by bringing her arms back to her side. She put her left foot out in front of her, not far in front of her right foot at the edge, and finished an otherwise inelegant landing with her preferred display of grace.

If there was _any_ sort of lingering effect from whatever that bear's ability was, there certainly wasn't any sign of it.

This was no time to feel relieved, though. She glanced back at Mammoth, who was hoisting the now-empty shelf assembly over his head. No sooner had she turned her eyes in his direction, than a burst of blue beams from behind her hit him, and he lost his grip on his oversized weapon. The empty assembly of shelves didn't have enough weight to do much other than fall off his head, but he stepped back and slipped on some unseen fluid. Not even attempting to balance himself with his arms, he fell backwards, the shelves still over him, and crashed into a giant stack of soda cans.

Carbonated foam sprayed away from the impact site in haphazard streams, settling into a slowly spreading sea of bubbly brown beverage. The fizzing noise masked the sound of the cans falling down; she couldn't tell how many were hitting shelf, tile or flesh. Not that she'd expect Mammoth to stay down for long in any case.

Meanwhile, Cyborg was slowly approaching, sonic cannon at the ready for when Mammoth inevitably recovered. "Uh...Hope you don't mind me shooting your friend there," he said a little sheepishly.

"I didn't choose the fight, so better him than me," she answered dismissively, trying to convince her conscience. "And it's not like _that'll _keep him down. What took you so long to recover with the sewer pumpkin, anyway?"

He threw her a disdainful look. "Sliding to a halt against a tile floor is a lot easier to take than being thrown into a rock-backed wall. Not that I'd expect _Miss Can't-Take-A-Hit_ to know that," he added sarcastically, while the improvised soda fountain quieted.

She groaned in annoyance. "_Sorry_. How about we get out of here, and save the name calling for later?"

"Fine by me," he answered, "got a preference for the exit?"

The exchange was interrupted by a piece of the fallen shelf assembly rising into the air, eventually revealing each side to be held by one of Mammoth's hands and the center balanced on his head. He leaned back slightly, vocally straining as his arms moved back as far as his impromptu headpiece would allow.

Over the course of the next second, Mammoth hurled the tortured chunk of metal with all his enhanced might, sending it careening down the clear path between the outer wall and where the sideways aisles started; Jinx flipped out of the way of being flattened, landing in one of those aisles, and Cyborg, too far to reach the aisle as Jinx had, took his readied shot at Mammoth as he moved to press against the wall and hope the thing missed.

With barely a foot of clearance on either side of the oversized projectile, Cyborg's attempt to squeeze out its way would've been fruitless; but it turned out not to matter: Cyborg's instinctive response was just too much for the wall to take, and he accidentally plowed straight through it before he could be hit. The loud crash of his impact melded into the similar crash against the far wall.

"Works for me," Jinx muttered as she sprinted across the intervening distance and through the newly available exit.

The store apparently spanned the entire width of the block, as she was greeted by the sight of a different street than before. Other than Cyborg picking himself up off the ground, it appeared to be unoccupied. Mammoth was sure to occupy it any second, though.

"Come on, we don't have time," she told Cyborg as she ran across the finally fogless street, before stopping on the pavement, looking at the handful of cars on that side of the street.

"What're we stoppin' for?" Cyborg asked, only a second behind her.

"Can you hotwire this convertible?" she asked, pointing at an orange car.

He paused, caught off-guard for a second, then sighed as he climbed into the driver's seat. "Not how I _like_ to work on cars, but yeah."

A crunch on the other side of the street introduced Mammoth, shambling towards the edge of the street.

"Another hole?" Cyborg said with mock disbelief as he got to work. "Sure loves breaking walls."

"Nothing new," she answered. "Hurry up!"

"What does it _look_ like I'm doin'?"

"Too busy watching what _he's_ doing!"

As Cyborg fiddled with electronics, it became apparent that Mammoth's immediate destination was not the two of them, but rather a blue compact car on that side of the street. With some trepidation, she walked to the side a couple feet, to get a clear view.

As she watched his giant fists crunch into either side of the car, she discovered that she wasn't as detached as she wanted to think she was. She _had_ thought it'd be easy to fight Mammoth when she was at severe risk, and even easier when Mammoth so clearly wasn't in control of himself; but now that she was faced with the thought of making a proactive strike, she was sick to her stomach to even consider it. It felt abhorrent, unnatural...immoral. She'd stabbed him in the back once, could she really stab him in the _face_ for something he wasn't even _responsible_ for?

"_Please tell me you're done!_" she half-yelled at Cyborg, sounded more stressed than she wanted to sound, but sounding less stressed than she _felt_. Mammoth's slow lifting of the car was about to force an unhappy choice on her if they couldn't get out of here _now_.

"Not yet, almost!"

If it were just a random stranger, it'd be easy. That did run against the whole "hero" thing she was supposed to be doing these days, but it wasn't as though this was a casual scenario; it'd be hard to save a city as a corpse. And in any case, being a random stranger meant she'd lose no sleep over who she didn't know. But Mammoth? Blowing up a car, while he was holding it, directly over his head? He'd already shown a lack of self-preservation in this state, the explosions could cripple or kill him, and _that_ she would lose sleep over.

Her own self-preservation kicked in, flooding her with a nauseating brew of determination and resignation. "Sorry," she squeaked under her breath, as she hurled a wide hex at the exposed underside of the car over Mammoth's head.

The car being slightly behind Mammoth when it detonated, the explosion did an excellent job of silhouetting him being blown flat against the concrete. The sound of the impact was overwhelmed by the same blast, but the brief shaking of the ground was impossible to miss.

The echo of the explosion faded, leaving the cacophony of overlapping car alarms in its wake. Momentarily unable to move herself, she watched Mammoth for any sign of movement, simultaneously hoping he was alright and dreading what she'd have to do if he _was_ alright...and still in condition to fight.

In the back of her mind she was aware of the sound of slightly reduced noise from a nearby car's alarm ceasing. Followed by low grumbling from Cyborg. Itself followed by a car's engine starting, then revving.

"Alright," Cyborg hollered, "Let's go!"

She found herself unwilling to move, despite knowing it was her idea in the first place. Unwilling to move her gaze away from Mammoth's potentially lifeless body. Potentially lifeless by her own hands.

"What are you waiting for?" Cyborg asked, his words falling on preoccupied ears.

Truth be told, she'd always suspected she'd get someone she knew killed some day, but this wasn't quite how she'd ever imagined it happening. She'd always assumed it'd the end result of a mistake on her part, or some of her bad luck rubbing off. Never that she'd be directly responsible.

"Look, he's fine! Unconscious, but fine."

_That_ got her attention. "Really?" she asked, before she realized how excited her voice was.

"Yeah, though I don't envy the headache he'll have when he awakens. Now come on, before his conscripted 'friends' show up!"

She decided she'd allow herself to feel relieved later. She hopped, literally, into the front passenger seat. "Alright, change of plans: Let's head straight for the Tower. I think we're _past_ the point when we can safely stop anywhere; We've got to get to the bottom of this, before the bottom of this gets a hold of _us_."

"As you wish," he agreed as he predictably tested the full capabilities of the car's accelerator. "What about all the kids?"

She shrugged. "We're out of options. Best hope is that they're all around here and we can leave them safely behind us."

"I hear ya. Let's burn some dust here."

Jinx glanced over at Cyborg. "Thanks," she said quietly. A remark apparently missed in favor of maniacal driving.

That suited her just fine.


	10. Chapter 10

_(Author's Note: HA! It takes more than a video card meltdown and a vomit inducing illness to stop _me_ from writing a new chapter! ...though it _did_ do a good job of slowing it down. But enough excuses, on with the show!)_

* * *

A potentially inappropriate smile graced Cyborg's lips.

Pressing harder on the gas pedal underfoot, the city blurred by as the car accelerated in response. Slight turning of the steering wheel, and the car rotated in its course, getting some extra distance from a van parked alongside the road. Just like he had planned.

The most control he'd had over _anything_ since the fiasco started. He felt kind of dirty, driving a conscripted convertible instead of the well-designed and legitimately owned T-Car. But after being on an almost nonstop run from zombie kids, _pumpkins_, bear _things_, and zombie _non_-kids; he was perfectly happy just being able to directly influence _something_.

His passenger, meanwhile, had been turning her head to look in various angles with a wary look on her face, as she had been for the past couple minutes. Cyborg guessed she was expecting something to come at them from any direction at any time; a prudent expectation given the series of events thus far. Still, a small part of his mind was smug at seeing her drop the "cool and in control" facade she loved to parade around.

"Ahead!"

A focused look in that direction revealed at least one rapidly approaching orange object. The sudden outburst gave him an extra split second of reaction time, and he made use of it by swerving into the other lane.

The single pumpkin, as it was revealed to be as it passed, was limited to lashing out at the car with the two nearer vines to itself, failing to have any noticeable effect on the car's body. It then continued through the air, passing the car entirely. The rear view in Cyborg's side mirror confirmed as the orange shape faded into the distance.

"_Flying_ pumpkins now?" Cyborg half-yelled over the air rushing by, burying the question of what kind it was.

"Think I saw a fifth vine on this one," Jinx responded to the unspoken query, as she placed the shoulder strap of her seat belt behind her. "Long, like that one at the warehouse."

"Right, _that _one couldn't air brake either. It'll have a hard time catching back up to us, I bet!"

"We don't know how many of them there are, _that's_ what worries me!"

As if on cue, another two zoomed in towards the car.

"It didn't _dodge_ well either," Cyborg said as he released his left hand's grip on the steering wheel and deployed his sonic cannon from it. "I got the one on the left!"

"Right—I mean got it."

With a continuous blue beam on the left, and a burst of violet waves to the right; both pumpkins ruptured, splattering their internal contents into the air.

And caking the windshield with irregular orange pulp. The force of the orange splatters pressing against the windshield squeezed eerily bright red fluid out. Fluid which, carried by the momentum of the car, flowed up and to the sides of the windshield, forming little streaks of liquid in the air as it flowed over the edges. The pulp itself separated and slid off the windshield in fibrous clumps.

"At least there's no _smell_ sticking around," Cyborg commented with subdued disgust, as he set the windshield wipers to cleaning off the orange and red streaks from the glass. At the same time he applied pressure to the brake pedal, uninterested in crashing due to insufficient visibility to avoid obstacles at high speed.

"Can we get to the freeway from here?" Jinx asked.

"Nearby? Not the one that'll get us closer to the Tower."

"Room to maneuver just became a priority."

"I hear ya," he replied in the affirmative. "We'll get on, head south, take the exit, and then get on the _west_-bound towards the Tower. Fastest way there, if you don't mind being real obvious and real visible."

"Visible doesn't matter, they _already_ know where we are. Wait," she added, her attention drawn to her side mirror. "Is that..."

He didn't need her to finish the sentence, her turning to face behind the car and the purple flash of light told him all he needed to know.

The pumpkin came screaming in from behind, too fast for Jinx's hex to connect. Its mass hit the windshield, shattering the glass as it bounced off the newly distorted frame, while a long vine ensnared Jinx's arm. Exactly what it was planning to do next, Cyborg had no interest in finding out.

He grabbed the vine with his right hand, then slammed on the brakes. Amidst the squeal of the tires against the road, inertia carried the pumpkin forward ahead of the car. When he felt the pressure of the vine reaching its limit, he shifted from the brakes to the gas. The pumpkin had no opportunity to reposition itself to avoid being the victim of a hit-and-run with an unhealthy crunch.

"_OW!_" Jinx yelled as the coil slid off her arm, its other end still attached to the newly fragmented pumpkin on the street.

"You alright?"

She looked at her arm for a second, during which time Cyborg realized that was the same arm that she got that cut on. "Well it's not bleeding _again_, but that _scraping_ stings like hell. Lot of pressure for how thin it looked."

"Seems like _all_ these pumpkin things are stronger than they should be. Well..freeway, comin' up!"

Getting onto the freeway was uneventful, with a lack of both traffic and gourd interception. The freeway itself had a complete lack of traffic, other than the two of them. Nor did it have any obstacles. Cyborg had expected _some_ amount of damaged dividers, abandoned vehicles, or other signs of aggression and/or widespread panic; but by now the fog was gone, and the road was in its normal state of repair as far as his eyes could see.

"This ain't right," he said. "Been following or searching for us all the way here, for hours, and a major road that leads _straight out of town_ is abandoned?" Not that they were heading that far out, but it would be an incredible access point to overlook.

"_Could_ be blocked off at the ends...but yeah, this is too big of an oversight."

"Maybe they can't catch us?" Cyborg offered hopefully.

"All the more reason to have messed up the freeway to slow us down, then. And there's not even any kids to keep track of us."

"But look at that skyline," he said, gesturing towards the wide-open view of skyscrapers in the distance. "We're the only thing _on_ this route, there's _loads_ of places to track us from out there."

"Then...That's not good. If they know where we _are_, but don't have anything _here_..."

"They're waiting for us. This is a freeway, limited access on or off. They're repositioning."

"We have to get off of here," Jinx said, glancing around more nervously than before.

"Love to, if I thought this thing could survive crashing through the concrete wall on the side. Suppose I could rig the accelerator, and we crash it through the wall unmanned...but we'd have to stop first to set it up, and they'll have time to converge when they see something's up. Bet the barrier'd win that fight anyway."

"Hmm. Rigging it to go ahead without us wouldn't work as well if you'd have to stop the car first, either."

"True, but we could still do it. It's a solid wall, we could head out of sight the other way after setting the car loose."

"Not a bad idea, but..." Her voice trailed off, and she stared out to the side for a couple seconds. "Great, _that's _our observer," she said sarcastically.

Cyborg spared a glance in her direction. A fair distance away, the sight of a pumpkin rising over the top edge of a building was easy to see. Partially because the light of the full moon was enough to make the orange apparent, but mostly because the width of the gourd was nearly equal to that of the building it was scaling.

"Whoa...That one of those things you and Starfire were fighting?"

"Sure looks like one, but they weren't _that_ big," she responded, sounding unduly apprehensive.

"Relax," he reassured her, "what's it going to do all the way over there?"

As if in reply, a dark green blur flashed in the space between the giant pumpkin and the nearly identical adjacent building. Followed by a crash loud enough to be heard even over the engine, as the oversized vine ripped through that adjacent roof with an upward angle, hurling chunks of architecture and HVAC material into the air.

Cyborg's years of experience of catching football passes quickly estimated the landing area and travel time of the debris, while his years of driving experience determined his location at that same time.

The two intersected _far_ too much for his liking.

_"THAT! HOLD ON!"_ he exclaimed, slamming the gas pedal to the floor, hoping to escape another crushing ordeal. He rapidly alternated his gaze between the road and the quickly approaching salvo, refusing to be distracted by the idle purple glow encircling Jinx's hand.

Flurries of motion and dust, accompanied by a cacophony of thuds, decorated the view in the side mirror. A concrete boulder rolled through in front of them, thankfully too far ahead for a collision. A steel girder seemed about to collide with them directly, before Jinx's readied hex rendered it into crumbling rust, falling behind them like industrial snow.

And the assault was past. Cyborg let out a relieved sigh with a breath he didn't remember holding. Suddenly he glanced back at the wreckage with a critical eye. He then hit the brakes, the tires squealing from the intensity as he firmly adjusted to their attempt to swerve wildly.

"What the _hell_ are you _doing_?" Jinx demanded.

"We needed a new hole in the barrier," Cyborg said as he turned the car around now that it was slow enough to maneuver. "We got one!"

"...fine," she eventually responded. "Just...try not to get us crushed or impaled."

"I hear ya!"

The giant chunk of concrete that plowed through the side wall seconds ago had enough momentum to roll straight through the _opposite_ divider; its absence in the mirror was what had sparked Cyborg's inspiration. He considered it very fortunate, as it would be quite an obstacle if it was stuck on the road. As it was, he had ample room to slip through the gap at a reasonably safe angle.

Not that slipping through the side headed _towards_ the giant pumpkin was the safest plan. But he was committed to finding an actual solution to this vegetable nightmare, and the lack of comment from Jinx told him she was equally determined.

He turned the car to the right at the next intersection, taking them north, before accelerating. "I'm taking recommendations," he prompted.

"That pumpkin went somewhere, it was steady on top of the building 'til we turned. These one-story buildings aren't going to hide us."

"Find taller buildings on the left?"

"Yeah. And keep your eyes open, I've had enough of _WHAT THE—_"

He didn't need to ask, as a three-story-tall set of four gigantic vines walked into view ahead of them, sporting a giant pumpkin at the top. Shortly before breaking into a charging run in their direction.

"_Hold on! Again!_" Cyborg yelled, slamming on the brakes and making a controlled spin. Tires squealed as the car rotated clockwise, with an oversized gourd he had to assume was enraged quickly approaching.

Three quarters of a full turn later he switched off the brakes and put the pedal to the metal on the accelerator side, sending the car careening down a side street a mere second away from being overrun.

"That the same one as before?" he yelled.

"No, _that_ one was _much_ too big to fit between these buildings," Jinx loudly replied over the roar of the engine.

Cyborg furrowed his brow, relaxing the pressure on the accelerator as he mentally balanced the need for speed with the need for maneuverability. This wasn't the T-Car, he couldn't count on all the high-performance tweaks this convertible didn't _have_. And running into a solid object would end their trip real quick. His November had barely started, it'd be a shame for it to end _now_.

"Did it back up that quickly, or is a _different_ one following us?" Jinx asked, as Cyborg's wobbling side mirror confirmed the presence of a mostly orange shape. "Wait, is it _gaining_ on us?"

That, Cyborg couldn't tell through the mirror. He glanced back, using his integrated rangefinder to gather some estimates. Hard to get a smooth reading with both the car and the pumpkin moving, but it was averaging around 600 feet. He looked at the speedometer, presently around 60mph. He glanced at the pumpkin again, averaging...570 feet now?

"Sure is!" he exclaimed as he directed his gaze forward, looking for a reasonably open block. He spotted a gap in the series of upright towers in the distance, on the left, presumably a parking lot. _"Hold on! Still!"_ he added, as he mentally calculated where he'd need to start a wide turn.

"_You can __**quit**__ saying 'hold on', __**I got it already!**_" she yelled.

Tires squealed as he turned the steering wheel hard left. The bump as the tires cleared the curb to pass through the block was jarring, but the car remained running with no immediate indications of structural damage. The parking lot itself was fortunately only holding a few other vehicles, none of them in a position to interfere with his maneuver.

It _was _incredibly risky, making the turn before he had any chance to see if something was in the way, but the non-zero chance of getting lucky was better than his odds against the overgrown pursuer.

"It's slowing," Jinx commented about that very pursuer while Cyborg smoothed out the turn, leaving them traveling along the cross street he'd aimed for. "Guess it can't turn at full trot."

"Well _that_ was exciting," Cyborg commented sarcastically. "Hope we can get away from it before it comes after us..."

Cyborg's train of thought was derailed by the appearance of the giant pumpkin on the street several blocks in front of them. Or was it..."Did that thing _jump_ all the way over here?"

Jinx looked back. "No," she answered, "_that_ one's still back there, coming after us!"

"There's _two_ of these things?"

"At _least_ two!"

Cyborg tried to think, quickly. To no avail. "I'm outta ideas, what you got?"

"Floor it, hope it flinches and can't grab us."

The pumpkin in front of them suddenly lowered its "head" close to the ground, and shoved the two nearer vines _through _the pavement with a crack loud enough to heard clearly over the car's engine. It then pried up the entire street, the edges of the pavement crumbling as it was lifted by two vines that looked too spindly for the amount of force required.

"_**FLOOR IT!**_" she screamed.

Cyborg yelled in frustration and determination as he slammed the accelerator down, not having any plan beyond "she better have a plan". The only things he could rely on were that they couldn't turn or they'd get pulverized against the side of a building, and they couldn't slow down or they'd be entangled by some monster vine and get pulverized anyway.

Apparently, Jinx had noticed a detail Cyborg didn't: the way the street was being pried out of the earth left its end pointing directly skyward. As the car became airborne, an abortive swipe of a vine was visible in a ground-facing side mirror. They'd escaped from the pumpkins. Briefly.

But now _gravity _had become a threat in its own right. Cyborg turned his head to yell at his passenger, figuring it would be a fitting use of his last couple seconds of pumpkin-free-or-living existence, but to his surprise she had managed to remove her seat belt and was now kneeling on the newly-horizontal back of the seat, staring away and downwards.

Cyborg wasted no time looking in the same direction on his side of the car. He saw rooftops slowly floating away, as gravity countered their upward speed. But that he could actually see the tops of roofs told him all he needed to know: They were _above _the buildings. And certainly within landing range of the girl who could fill even _ninja_ with feelings of inadequacy.

"_Jump!_" she commanded.

Glancing back at her wasn't the best idea, but it was instinct and already done by the time he realized it was a mistake. In any case, she was gone, noticeable only as a twirling blur in the air.

But he had no time. Hurriedly he ripped the seat restraints, punched off the door and used all his musculature against the car. This gave him a good push, and of course no one would be able to recognize the car as _being_ a car when it hit the ground, to say nothing of recognizing the damage he'd just caused.

As he moved through the sky, air rushing in his face and orange dots far below, he found himself envying how Robin could have pulled off a jump at least as well as Jinx did, or how Beast Boy would just turn into a bird of some sort for a few seconds, or how Raven and Starfire could hover as easily as he could run. How did _he_ end up being the one in the air?

His jump wasn't enough to make it to the rooftop. Instead he crashed through a window, then through a couple floors, until a copy machine broke his fall. He groaned in pain, rubbing his head in hopes the disorientation would subside quicker.

The muffled sound of a large crash out the window managed to get his attention. The view out the window was dominated by an office building, which was shaking slightly. Two giant pumpkins came into view, apparently having jumped from the street below, and hitting the top of that office building, side by side. Followed by the two floating to the ground amidst a thunderous crunch as the building toppled over.

Fortunately it was falling _away_ from the building he was in, but then there was another loud crash, and the rattling of windows all around, accompanying what felt like a single tremor from a mild earthquake. Every couple seconds this happened again, the apparent tremor getting milder and the noises softer each time.

It took a little while for Cyborg to realize what was going on. The buildings were falling over in a row, like oversized dominoes. But why'd they knock over the first building? It made no sense to him.

Then he realized, the car had been moving straight up. So if he was in _this_ building, Jinx would have landed on...

Oh no.

He opened the channel to her communicator. "Jinx, come in!" he said.

No response.

"You OK?"

No response.

"Answer me!"

No response.

"Jinx?"

No response.

He sighed sadly and shook his head, as he closed the channel. So he was alone. Again.

The sudden sound of shattering glass accompanied an oversized, leafy vine crashing through the window, headed into the corner of whatever room this was supposed to be. He rolled off the wreckage of the copy machine right as the vine swept through, pushing what was left of it through another window.

He got to his feet and busted straight through the wall, looking for a way out of the building.


	11. Chapter 11

_(Author's Note: ...Happy impending Halloween, peoples!)_

* * *

The giant vines had not assaulted Cyborg further.

He had, however, charged through two doors, shimmied down five floors worth of elevator cable, and hid in a stall in a women's restroom. Just in case.

They were still out there, though. Kneeling on the tiled floor, the seemingly imperceptible vibrations of two massive creatures gently "walking" carried through his body enough for his internal instruments to detect. A patrol around the perimeter of the building.

He pressed a hand against his forehead, in an instinctive—and futile—attempt to accelerate his thought processes. There wasn't enough time to think. Or perhaps more accurately, there was too much to think _about_. A head full of multiprocessing chips is incredibly useful, when there's much calculation to be done.

But that wasn't the case here. The kind of planning and deduction he needed to do required creative association, and trying to accomplish _that_ with his set of multiprocessors was akin to trying to achieve flight with an ordinary bicycle. While theoretically _possible_, it would require a contrived set of conditions and luck on par with finding an alien disguised as a ghost in a basket. And he imagined _that_ would also turn his sonic cannon into a radio.

And _that_, he realized, was an example of the type of connection-making that those chips were unsuited for.

The most useful thing he'd come up with thus far was that the wide jamming was still in effect, and thus Jinx's failure to respond over communicator _might_ be due to her escaping out of the limited range, instead of her demise. While not the most _directly _helpful conclusion, it cut back his preoccupation over her, improving his capability to consider other chains of thought.

For instance, her theory that the pumpkins' ultimate goal was to capture the core Titans was on the mark: they literally toppled several buildings just to get at her, whereas they were merely holding a vigil outside. If they were trying to kill _him_, they'd have knocked over _this _building, too. Secondly, they must have normal sensory perception; if they had the ability to sense his location despite intervening walls, they'd have pried him out of the elevator shaft, like they'd tried with the room they'd seen him land in.

Those two put together, he realized, meant they weren't going to act prior to finding him, which meant he could make the next move. But _what_ move? They weren't going to wait for him to come out, not when they had throngs of zombie-like kids that could easily scour the building for any trace of him. He'd have to make a clever exit, somehow. And before enough kids could be rounded up to saturate the building, a timespan he had no way of knowing.

His thoughts were interrupted by the brief rattling of the simple metal lock of the stall door against its similarly metallic mechanism. For a moment he thought maybe locking the flimsy door wasn't as worthless as his rational mind had thought, but a cramped glance under the door revealed no one. Then the rattling returned, and this time Cyborg could easily feel and almost see the vibrations of the building.

He must've ended up somewhere near the exterior of the building, he decided; he wasn't performing any actual navigating during his tactical withdrawal, such as it was. The giant pumpkins would have a lot of weight to put on the ground, and the closer they were the stronger the vibrations became. They were the immediate threat; he had no means to outrun them on foot, and no means to outmuscle creatures that could rip slabs of concrete from the ground.

Wait.

There was his opening. Literally. That chunk of road was pried up from _something_, after all; and since the angle on the car's fateful drive was directly vertical, that opening would have to be near the building he was now in.

Worst case scenario would be that the road was extracted from solid ground instead of some open space underneath, in which case he'd need to hurry across the length of the road, use the up-curled road as a visual barrier, until he could get into the debris of the buildings on the other side, amongst which he would be nearly impossible to locate.

And of course, hope he didn't come across a bloody mess of pink hair splattered with pale flesh.

Pushing brief recollections of a myriad splatter films out of his mind, he returned the porcelain throne to full ownership of its containing space. Once his own image in the mirror ceased vibrating, he headed out the door into the corridor, setting off to approach the second floor.

* * *

Cyborg's trip down to the second floor was uneventful, though the tremors grew louder as he got nearer to their source. The rhythmic pattern of low booms melded with the rattling of glass grew increasingly unsettling; he managed to convince himself that it was just like when Beast Boy made the TV play that scene from Jurassic Park on repeat: the trick was to not let the giant green monster sneak up on him. Whether that monster held a giant gourd aloft, or was Beast Boy doing a tyrannosaur impersonation for a practical joke.

Traversing the second floor to the window nearest his escape route was unexpectedly easy. Cyborg had been prepared to use his detachable hand-cams to scout ahead, away from the sight of the giant pumpkins, but it turned out to be unnecessary: This floor employed tall cubicle walls instead of the open floor plan he had seen on the other floors, and the walls' height were sufficient for Cyborg to conceal his height with a slouch instead of a mobility-limiting crawl; and his x-ray vision had no issue with the cheap cloth-covered walls.

A cubicle was situated in his target area; even in the event a search party came through, he had a good chance of escaping detection long enough to make his getaway. The next step...was finding the right moment to move. He hated waiting. Fortunately, he had a plan to cut down on some of it.

He deployed one of his mobile hands and remote controlled it to crawl into the hallway. After a brief moment of feeling like a crew member for the Addams Family, he had it place itself in a walkway junction, where the thing could see both out a large window on the opposite side of the building and the most obvious entry points. When one of the giant pumpkins crossed that spot on the other side or the search team he was expecting came to this floor, he'd see them coming. The interior lights might be off, but the full moon outside provided enough illumination to work with.

Conveniently, he didn't need to wait long. Several seconds later, his hand-cam observed an awkward gait of four oversized vines out the opposite window, crossing from the right side to the left. Each step involved lifting _two_ vines straight up, moving them forward in unison, then plunging them back down in sync with half of the booms he was still hearing. The two guard gourds were obviously not moving in sync, and based on how he had seen these now-awkward things outrunning a _car_ he surmised they weren't suited for guard duty either. Probably grown, and maybe trained, for high speed and heavy hitting, forcing improvisation for the delicate-in-comparison maneuvering.

"Can we play xenobiologist _later_?"

For a split second, Cyborg's eyes darted all around, thinking he had actually heard Jinx's voice. But even if she _was_ imaginary, or perhaps hallucinatory, she had a point: He was going to lose an opportunity if he didn't start paying more attention to his own plan.

The plan was fairly straightforward: It was not physically possible for two roving patrollers to be able to see all sides of the building at all times, so he would break through the window when neither could see where he went, making it impossible for them to follow. Thanks to the sighting observed through his hand-cam, he could reasonably estimate the location of one of the giant gourds; a quick glance to be sure the other one was conveniently distant was all he'd need before making his move.

By the time he had run the numbers in his head, it was _already_ the optimal time. After his hand-cam verified that no giant pumpkin was waiting around either corner, he directed it back and reattached it to his arm. He looked down with his x-ray vision mode, in case there was something already in his landing zone, but there was simply too much material in the way to get any sort of reading down to street level.

Since there was no way to improve his situation, he took the chance and leapt through the window. Or more accurately, leapt into the vertical cubicle wall and took a portion of it through the window with him. The loud crash of shattering glass was less stealthy than he would have liked, but still acceptable since his entire plan was centered around not being where he landed when the pumpkins came by to investigate.

Once he had cleared the window, the lack of intervening building allowed his x-ray vision to see through the fabric-covered divider...and detect three short humanoid shapes nearby at street level. Grabbing the edges of the partition, he tried to alter the aerodynamics of the flat surface to control his precise landing spot. Unfortunately, the wall had naturally been facing in the direction he'd plunged it through the glass with, and drag had already negated its forward motion; straight down was the only direction left.

Lacking any other idea, Cyborg held the divider under him, nearly flat with respect to the ground. He had no expectations that it would serve to cushion his fall in any manner, but the odds of it surviving the fall were approximately nil in any case, and his instincts told him that a seemingly futile effort was slightly better than a wasted effort. Slightly. He was beginning to wonder if he had actually planned this escape as well as he thought.

The wall was reduced to flinders and small puffs of fuzz when Cyborg's weight smashed it against the pavement. As the sound of the crash resounded between his ears, he got a chance to look at the three kids. A boy and girl dressed as pirates, both with a general white-shirt-and-leather-props scheme; and a kid dressed as a ghost, whose white-sheet-draped-over-the-head look masked any sort of identifying features. The eyes of the pirate lookalikes glowed a light blue, while the exaggerated eyeholes on the ghost were a solid black.

None of them made a visible reaction to his arrival, having apparently been caught off guard by the gravity-powered exit strategy. Cyborg's descent had, however, displaced a lot of air, and as he got to his feet he saw the "wind" ripple across the pirates' shirts and under the ghost's sheet.

Wait.

Cyborg hadn't risen fully from the ground, so he saw quite clearly how the bottom edges of the ghost's sheet were blown off the ground, with nothing visible holding the rest of the kid in the air. So either someone's parent spent their entire budget on _military grade_ hover technology and had to cover it up with a _bedsheet_, Gizmo had learned how to shut his face, or...

On a hunch, Cyborg quickly grabbed the edge of the sheet and yanked it off. The sheet didn't _move _like Cyborg thought it would, some sort of bulk attached on the inside made it slightly more difficult to remove. But as he had suspected, there was a small pumpkin floating underneath. Or at least, he assumed it _could _be some form of pumpkin.

A volume of thin green fibers, looking more like unfurled moss than the vines he'd seen on any of the other pumpkins, trailed down from the bottom of the hovering gourd, ending six inches above the ground. The gourd itself didn't appear particularly pumpkin-like, either: An ellipsoid with roughly the proportions of a human head, it didn't have the vertical indentations common to pumpkins, nor a stem of any sort. Instead, its surface was covered with irregular-looking, curved grooves. The unmarred portions of the surface bore a grainy texture that appeared almost wooden, except for the bright orange color. A cyan glow emanated from the grooves.

As he was taking in the bizarre sight, the glow rapidly intensified; and the two actual kids started moving forward. Cyborg followed his instinct and swung a fist at the glowing abomination with a yell. To his surprise, the substance of the gourd gave no resistance to the punch, and the glow blackened immediately as the fist punctured the far side of it.

Red, orange and gray matter splattered on the pavement, and what was left of the creature fell into a heap on the ground, its frail "skin" splitting on Cyborg's wrist. He instinctively used the sheet, which was still in his other hand, to wipe the leftovers off of himself. He couldn't quite identify the faint smell of the stuff, but it was close enough to rancid meat that he thought it might be better that he _couldn't_ tell what it was.

Then he heard the two kids start bawling. He glanced between them warily, prepared for some sort of trick. But from the brief moments when their eyes were open, he saw the glow was gone.

More importantly, he heard and felt those two _giant_ pumpkins sprinting closer.

"Time to go!" he told himself, as he picked up the two kids and covered their high-volume mouths with his hands.

He ran across the street, heading straight for the edge between the mountains of debris from the line of toppled buildings and the still intact buildings alongside them. Carrying two kids, he had lost his capacity to sneak or to fight. All he had left was run and hide, and to that end he needed somewhere to hide.

He tried to ignore the minor tremors of their pursuers as he jogged, hopped and otherwise navigated the paths between chunks of debris. The kids quickly figured out that squirming was not something they should be doing, which made Cyborg's movement easier to manage.

As he passed by a gap between the buildings on his right, a red flash caught his eye. He looked in that direction...and saw two small robots bearing soft red lights, sitting on the edge of a dumpster. The lighting and distance made it difficult to judge detail, but one of them resembled a food processor, including the clear plastic container, given small metal legs. The other appeared to be have been a one-inch-wide cube before similar legs were attached.

After a couple more tremors, their lights blinked some pattern in unison, before the two machines turned around and hopped forward...where there happened to be a hole. Cyborg recognized the light signal as highly accelerated Morse code; the message was "come".

The next deep rumble told Cyborg he didn't have time to argue. He quickly made his way to the hole and, after checking the distance and surface composition, jumped down. The sound of wheels accompanied the sight of the dumpster rolling to block the hole.

A solitary red light glowed patiently at Cyborg. He activated his shoulder lamp. The light was from the cube thing, sitting _in_ the blending portion of the other robot. It turned out to be solitary because the blender robot was facing away from him. The "come" message blinked again, and the larger of the two small robots started hopping away. Cyborg quietly followed.


	12. Chapter 12

_(Author's Note: *GASP* ...NOT...DEAD. Lacking in self-discipline for ten months, sure, but dead? Nope! Rather than dwell on the details, I'm going to say I've gotten back to writing on a regular basis, and remark that it would be a big surprise if the next chapter takes nearly that long to complete...)_

* * *

Sloshing through a shallow layer of sewage, following what appeared to be a reject from the Brave Little Toaster, he hoped the kids appreciated his sacrifice. Plugging his own nose would be a relief from the stench, but he'd have to dump one or both of the children to free his hand to do it.

Several minutes later, the entire group had ended up at a dead end, with brick walls blocking each direction. Before Cyborg had a chance to object, or even consider how well these machines would be able to interpret or react to any objection, a slightly irregular mass of bricks on the wall in front of him receded backwards. It then slid down and out of view with a soft grinding sound, leaving a well-sized opening to a passage beyond. The blender-looking robot didn't wait for the slight echo to stop before hopping over the threshold formed by the few remaining bricks at the bottom of the "wall".

Cyborg stepped through as well, and was quietly relieved that the smell hadn't penetrated this chamber even _before_ the "door" slid back into place. When the wall was sealed, many red lights appeared in the darkness, to the left and right. Cyborg quickly turned to check the source of the red lights with his shoulder lamp, and what he saw were many robots. Similar to the two that had led him here in the first place, they all had a red "eye" and seemed to have been assembled from various pieces of household appliances. Most of them were small like those two, but a few human-sized and one larger shape were present. All seemed fixated on him.

It only took Cyborg a fraction of a second to put all the clues together. "Fixit?" he asked loudly.

"Yes," came the flat response from out the other end of the passage. "You may release the children."

Cyborg's tactile sensors detected the two kids pulling harder on his frame. "Maybe later."

"As you wish." Light began to shine from the far end of the passageway. "Enter."

The attached room was very different from the chamber Cyborg remembered from his first encounter with Fixit, which had strongly resembled a surgical theater. Suppressing the shiver that attempted to manifest itself in his spine, he noticed several kids and...police officers?

"Mr. Cyborg, you came back!" exclaimed a familiar young voice.

"Uh...close enough!" Cyborg answered the kid he'd only met a few hours ago, right before this nightmare struck. _Technically _they'd both managed to end up at the same spot...just like when they were at the same spot in the first place. Which did raise the question..."How'd you get here, anyway?" he asked, as he gently set down the much-less-reluctant kids in his arms.

One of the police officers answered. "You were there when we regrouped, right? Wasn't as secure as we thought; about an hour into all this a bunch of kids came by and trashed the cars. We thought we were goners when this red light led us here through the sewer."

"Sounds familiar. Hey Fixit, do you have those drones of your watching the entire city?"

"No," the non-capitalized cyborg answered. "The city is far too large for the limited number of drones available. While a drone could be relocated to monitor a specific location, given sufficient time...only prominent events can be reliably observed."

"'Prominent events?'" Cyborg repeated.

"Yes." And with that, the clear glass frame behind Fixit, which Cyborg had assumed to be an improvised wall decoration, revealed itself as a fully functional screen. Fixit's eyes glowed brighter as a black-and-white video sequence played on the monitor.

The grayscale sequence showed a solitary car driving at full speed down a city street, with what had to be a giant pumpkin chasing it. Cyborg recognized the vehicle as the car he was driving not that long ago, and the surroundings as the street he'd taken after getting off the bridge. The viewing angle suggested a camera, or drone, perched atop the corner of a building.

"Huh. Sure looks less hectic from a distance than from the driver's seat."

When the playback of the scene ceased, Cyborg took a moment to focus his thoughts. There were many things he wanted to ask, but time was still at a premium. The handful of people in the room were by no means the population of Jump City..."Are there any current..._prominent_ events?"

Fixit replied in monotone, "The most recent such event was your departure, that eventually led to your arrival here."

"OK, so nothing newer. Do you know how those weird pumpkins are making kids do things?"

"_It wasn't me!_"a half-yelling, half-bawling girl's voice pierced the relative silence.

Cyborg turned, startled, and quickly recognized the girl he'd been hauling around. "It's alright, it's not your fault."

She sniffled a couple times. "It was like...thinking to myself, but not my voice. Like an animal, but with...words. I didn't know what they meant, but my arms and legs moved _without _me!" And she broke down, bawling once more.

"Don't worry, you're safe now." _I hope_.

He considered asking his other "passenger", but the boy was staring at the ground. Cyborg thought he detected tears forming in the boy's eyes.

So he turned back to Fixit. "Guess that answers that."

"Subjugated thought processes," Fixit summarized. "As to your inquiry, elaborate on 'weird pumpkins'."

"Well, almost all of these monsters have been pretty pumpkin-like. Except this last one, it was disguised as a kid and looked like...some kind of pumpkin-brain-jellyfish."

"That aspect of the event was observed. No similar creatures have been observed, due to the drones' inability to penetrate such a disguise."

He didn't know about them, then. Cyborg sighed in frustration as the "lead" kept getting poorer. "Do you know where the other Titans are?"

"Neither Robin, Raven, nor Beast Boy have been visually located. Starfire was observed being carried into Titans Tower unconscious, shortly after drone deployment."

"Wait, you were monitoring the Tower?"

"And presently monitoring the Tower, yes; it is highly visible."

The screen shifted to a black-and-white image of the Tower, the island...and many odd smudges that didn't quite blend with the water they were sitting in. Cyborg asked, "What are those weird spots on the water? Is this realtime?"

"Yes."

"Can you get a closer view, or a color image?"

"The drone will focus the view." The image in the display zoomed in on one of the spots.

The resulting shape with that level of detail appeared very gourd-like. And very familiar to Cyborg..."Umm, what about color?"

"The drones do not possess the ability to transmit imagery in color. They are capable of measuring light frequencies, however, and in this case the entire shape is strongly in the green portion of the spectrum."

Cyborg shuddered. "Man, we fought _one_ of those things in the sewer, and it almost beat us. I don't know how I could deal with...however many of them are there."

"The drones count forty-three."

"Forty_-three_ of them are out there?!"

"Forty-three have been counted. There is insufficient coverage to determine anything that could be behind the Tower or island."

"So at _least_ forty-three."

"Correct."

Cyborg groaned. Even if it were only forty-three, and he could plot all their locations, he had no real knowledge of their mobility. He'd been submerged for most of that fight, and there wasn't much water for the thing to have maneuvered through anyway. The only person who might know would...

Wait. Fixit had listed the _original_ Titans. Cyborg took a moment to ponder whether he really wanted the answer to this next question:

"Do you know if Jinx is alright?"

"Inconclusive."

"'_Inconclusive?_'"

"Her present status could not be determined." Once again, the grayscale image on the screen shifted; this time to a number of tall buildings. The car abruptly rising into the air in the image gave Cyborg a frame of reference. The quickly twisting shape launching itself from the car, towards the "camera", indicated Cyborg would soon be jumping in the opposite direction.

The twisting shape, which was clearly Jinx, rolled into a ball prior to making contact with a roof. It slowed as it rolled across; until it broke into a handstand and somehow twisted against the ground, leaving Jinx in a standing position facing the opposite direction, towards the car. Cyborg didn't have time to compare Jinx's acrobatic smoothness to Robin's utilitarian approach, as he saw himself fall through several floors of the building across the street; he recalled the cacophony of crashing so clearly he might as well have been hearing it again, and his joints ached slightly from the memory.

She pulled out some handheld object, but she lost her grip when the building violently shook, just before it started falling over, towards the right side of the "camera"'s view. Jinx, in the center of the roof, wasted no time in turning around and running in the same direction the building was going, keeping her feet in contact with the ever-tilting surface.

The screen started following her movement. The first building briefly stopped moving when it slammed the building behind it, but Jinx smoothly turned her fall into a handspring with little loss in momentum. She completed the leap to that second building right as it had started tipping over itself. Again, she simply added a handspring to the end of her landing, continuing her run undeterred.

For about a minute and several buildings, this pattern continued: she ran across a tilting roof, jumped across near the edge, and turned the otherwise harsh landing into a feat of acrobatics. She certainly seemed to be on par with momentum itself.

But then, her posture changed: She abandoned her controlled motion in favor of the full-speed forceful sprint that Cyborg tended to use himself; a change he could only feel was desperate. The "camera" had been rotating to the right, to keep Jinx in view...and now it revealed that the building she was aiming for was a tall building like the one he had landed in. Far too tall for a jump from the rooftop she was on.

As he watched her charge across a rapidly tilting roof, she threw a hex at that building, and a window...or maybe a section of wall, between the distance and the colorlessness of the playback he couldn't tell...flashed and crumbled. When she reached the edge of the room, she leapt, and managed to go through the opening after a second in midair.

Right before the falling building fell into the skyscraper, the edge of its roof hitting a few floors below Jinx's landing spot. Or rather, the building fell _through_ it. The imagery was still insufficient for Cyborg to guess at materials, but the falling building wasn't noticeably slowed by the impact, and continued to fall through the space occupied by the taller building. It, in turn, succumbed to gravity and fell _towards_ the other buildings.

The video didn't include sound, but that didn't prevent Cyborg from imagining the cacophony when he saw the top half of that building slam into the tops of the building-dominoes, spraying glass and raising dust everywhere.

Cyborg was still in shock when the display shut down, and when Fixit stated "she has not been observed since." He forced himself to think. It certainly _looked _horrid, but at the same time Jinx made improvisational avoidance an art. If _anyone _could avoid being crushed in that building without prior warning, it'd be her.

He took a deep breath. "So she could be alive and well, but inside what's left of the building where your drones couldn't find her?"

"Correct," Fixit answered.

Cyborg briefly clinched his eyes in concentration. He'd have to backtrack to find her, then he'd have to find her, and he could be assaulted while looking for her, but could he continue on his own, that she _could_ be OK didn't mean she _would _be—

"Can your drones search the debris?" Cyborg interrupted his own train of thought. Time to drown the doubts with information.

"No. They have no means of ascending the supporting structures."

"Supporting structures? _What_ supporting structures?"

The screen flared to life again, showing the site from the side. The shorter buildings, the ones Jinx had crossed, were certainly far worse for wear; cracks and large missing pieces abounded. But they still resembled their own rectangular shape, even if they were standing at oblique angles. And the pathetic looking mass of metal that used to be the taller building, while mangled where it met the other roofs at those angles, wasn't _completely_ pulverized. Someone inside might _not_ have been crushed!

Cyborg certainly felt that was an odd thought to find hope in, but he didn't expect this whole situation to start making sense _now_. He tried recalling the events he saw on the playback on Jinx's escape...or her unreasonable facsimile of an escape. The last building before the glass building didn't appear to have stopped when it hit that glass, so it would keep falling through, so it would, in theory, be flat against the ground except...

"Can you show me the far end of that, on the ground?"

The screen flickered briefly, before showing the requested area. Sure enough, most of the building was flush against the ground, but there was plenty of debris. A few chunks appeared tall enough to be within jumping distance of _missing_ chunks in the building, and from there he could climb onto the wall that was now a roof. The glass building was clearly suspended in air at that area, presumably held due to whatever weight was concentrated with the rest of the buildings.

Since it wasn't crushed, there was a distinct possibility he could conduct a search of some sort, assuming he could get inside. And there was a visible path to climb to the outer edge of that building, at which point he'd just need to find a way in that could support his weight.

He decided that was a problem he'd simply have to deal with, if it came up. He still wasn't liking the odds of Jinx being in a condition that she could assist with the still-necessary liberation of the Tower, but they were still a heck of a lot better odds than trying to reclaim the Tower solo. "Any kids, bears, pumpkins, whatever?"

"Yes," Fixit answered, "but sparse. Many children are concentrated in a ring expanding away from the site."

So they still were trying to find where Cyborg had gotten off to. Probably weren't expecting him to be dumb enough to go _back_...which was perfect. "How close do these sewer entrances get to the location?"

"The one you entered is the closest."

Cyborg scratched his chin. "Wouldn't leave much time for dilly-dallying, then."

"Wait," one of the police officers interjected. "You're really thinking about going _back _there?!"

"Well...yeah," he answered.

"You could be caught," another officer said. "Or worse!"

Cyborg took a deep breath. It was all true, and yet..."So could Jinx. I'm not leaving her just because it'd be convenient."

"Who's going to save the city without you?"

Cyborg lowered his eyebrow at the misplaced guilt trip attempt. "Who's going to save the city if I can't do it all myself? Besides, she helped me get _this_ far, she deserves my help."

_I can take care of _myself_, I don't need _your_ help._

He blinked at the odd recollection of her voice in his head. "No matter how much she may not want it," he muttered to himself.

"Scans are now complete," Fixit interrupted.

Cyborg looked askance at him. "Scans of what?"

"Your systems are damaged. Repairs are needed."

He frowned. The _last_ time he'd heard that, Fixit's ideas of "repairs" was to literally remove Cyborg's flesh and blood. Hardly fun times. Besides which, his own sensors hadn't picked up any physical system damage. "What _kind_ of damage?"

"Node failures in the audio processing cluster. False reception is possible."

Cyborg silently clenched his teeth. That system was responsible for both hearing and playback of recorded sounds, and sending them to his brain. The couple times he thought he heard Jinx could be memory recall going through the wrong "pipe", as it were. His own sensors wouldn't pick up this level of damage, either; only if it progressed far enough that his actual hearing was impacted.

Which was much more likely if the system had already taken damage, like it apparently had when he crashed through several floors of building. "How long would it take you to fix it?" Not that he was entirely comfortable with the idea of someone else working on _him_, much less Fixit, but he felt _way_ past the point where he could afford to be picky.

"An hour is estimated."

He barely needed to consider it. "No thanks, then. I've got Jinx to find and a city to save; that'll take too long to risk."

_Thanks._

That was odd, he didn't remember when she originally said that.

But now was not the time for recollection. "I suppose you don't have any drones to spare."

"Correct."

Cyborg sighed. Not that he was genuinely _expecting_ reinforcements, but he would have gotten over being wrong rather quickly.

A young voice interrupted his thoughts. "But...Mr. Cyborg, aren't you scared?"

More than he was willing to admit. "Well I sure ain't _thrilled_ about it. But there are gigantic pumpkin _things_ running around out there, tearing things up, and right now I'm the only one who can possibly stop them. So I'm going to get out there and _stop_ them, even if I _am _scared. Even if I'm not sure how I'm going to do it yet. I can fix myself _after _it's safe, you don't need to worry about that." Largely because if things went bad, his hearing would be the _least_ of his problems.

No sense worrying about that _now_, though. Cyborg turned back to Fixit. "Before I go, let's see some of those earlier 'prominent events'..."


	13. Chapter 13

_Freaking pumpkins._

Jinx had taken to breathing with her elbow covering her mouth. Her lungs did not approve of whatever had been in the mutilated-almost-beyond-recognition things that used to be walls.

_Freaking buildings._

She supposed she could be thankful that only _most_ of the walls were so trashed when everything fell over; that what was now the floor was mostly intact and what was now the ceiling was halted by the debris of the other walls, instead of breaking on top of her. Or crushing her like a bug, she had no idea how much weight was behind it. She could hardly _look_ at it.

_Freaking gravity._

With only a foot or so of vertical clearance, she couldn't turn on her side. Or her back. She had already done the unthinkable and _undone her hair_ just so she could turn her head and look at something besides the floor. Somewhere, a spirit of vanity was frothing at the mouth.

_**FREAKING PUMPKINS!**_

And it probably sounded _just_ like that.

A two-foot wide hole in the "floor" wasn't much help. Looking down through it, she could see what remained of a window—which was a good indicator of the upheaval, since when she ran _into_ the room there was a hallway separating it from any windows—and a long way down towards a toppled building below. Even if she _were_ inclined to try squeezing through the hole, there was no space to position herself to make a landing she could walk away from.

She had no real prospects for escape, either. The glow of a hex idling on her hand wasn't a particularly efficient light source, but it had worked. Sheetwall-like debris formed a box, about seven feet wide and fifteen feet long, that the "ceiling" rested on. She had crawled around the perimeter, without even enough clearance to get on her knees, but it was about the same all around: the weight of the "ceiling" packed the debris too densely to be cleared by hand, and using a hex would almost certainly destroy the floor she was laying on in such a tight space.

And of course, she lost her grip on her communicator when those freaking gourds rammed the building she was standing on. Not that it'd be much direct use, but it'd be helpful to know whether or not Cyborg was remotely nearby. She didn't even know how long she'd actually been here, she lost track of time while straightening out her horn-shaped masses of hair without so much as a comb. And it'd take forever to get all that hair _back_ into place.

She rolled her eyes in frustration. Somehow, out of everything she'd been through thus far, it was her _hair_ and the thing with Mammoth that managed to genuinely bother her. Probably because they were the only things she had caused herself, she decided. In other circumstances, she'd wonder whether she was _really_ so selfish as to put her hair on the same level as any of her friends; but as it was there was simply little else to think about.

Other than how she ended up here in the first place. She mentally replayed the events, trying to see if there was something else she could've done; but she chose the optimal plan as far as she could tell. She didn't have the opportunity to choose _where_ she landed on the building after jumping out of the car, the buildings fell over too quickly for her to have made it to the side to jump out of the way, and she'd have been crushed if she had jumped off of the last building instead of into _this_ one. She had chosen the best course of action, as far as she could tell.

Being confined to a makeshift crawlspace certainly didn't make her _feel_ like it was the best course of action, though. She felt almost nostalgic for the "old days", as they'd started to feel. Sure, the petty crime was hardly fulfilling, but as an instigator she had far more control over the course of events. The type of serial improvisation that led to one becoming trapped in the upper half of a toppled office building, for example, only ever seems to happen to those reacting to events, not those causing them in the first place.

Jinx creased an eyebrow in thought. Maybe she'd been going about this all wrong...

She crawled back towards that hole in the floor. _Playing_ it safe had thus far done a spectacularly poor job of _keeping _her safe, she decided, and it was time to take some risks.

First off, she needed to get out of here. Throwing a hex would still probably plunge her to her doom; and her solution to that was to not toss a hex near a floor. That meant the hole in the floor. And since she couldn't reach any of the walls from there without intersecting floor, _that_ meant her only viable target was the ceiling.

Would that help? She didn't know. Would it get her crushed? Possibly, but the odds of being found by someone _friendly_ were far slimmer.

She took a deep breath, since the night air floating up through the hole was easily the cleanest breathing room in the entire space. Then she stretched an arm out, gently tossed a purple wave of energy towards the ceiling, and quickly withdrew her arm.

Her squeak of surprise was drowned out by the refrigerator crashing through the weakened ceiling and taking a chunk out of the floor, followed by several large pieces of debris and what sounded like kitchen utensils.

About three seconds later, she heard the muffled sound of the refrigerator hitting brick wall below.

She shuddered. Three seconds of fall time meant the distance was about eighty feet more than she'd estimated, she couldn't handle a fall like that even in optimum conditions. She'd have to try to go up now. She didn't want to _think_ about would've happened if she'd tried squeezing through that hole earlier.

It'd be a lot like if she fell through _now_, really.

After waiting for silence to prevail for a few seconds, she slowly crawled forward, to the edge of the newly-enlarged hole and its ceiling counterpart. She paid special attention to her sense of balance, in case the floor had lost the ability to support her weight, but it seemed reasonably sturdy.

She grabbed the edges of the ceiling above her, and gently applied pressure up and down. The ceiling didn't move. She repeated with the edges of the ceiling across the hole, and again it showed its stability.

Grabbing the far edge with her hands, she pulled herself forward, then lifted her legs through the hole and onto the ceiling, one leg at a time. Then she rolled away from the hole, not willing to trust it to keep supporting her. The only problem she had was accidentally wrapping her own hair around her legs. While its _actual_ impact was negligible, it infuriated her immensely.

She glanced around. The debris being lit by moonlight indicated that it was clear all the way up. The drawers, dishwasher and sink implied this had been a kitchen or break room of some sort. That would explain the refrigerator at least...

After gingerly unraveling her hair from her leg, she stood up. Shaking her head and sighing, she put her hands behind her head and began the almost-unconscious process of restraining her hair in a more conventional manner. It'd taken _years_ for her to first get the hang of maintaining the delightful accentuation of devil-horn hair, after all; and now, going through more mundane techniques by rote was easier than falling off a bicycle.

She'd have greatly preferred to restore her hair to its proper and fashionable state, but there was neither time nor supplies. And she wasn't going to risk losing some fight by tripping over her own hair, that'd just be insulting.

She planned her next move, while working on her hair. The opening at the top was the most obvious way out of the room, but if there had been enough force to pulverize the walls in the room below, these walls must've taken structural damage too. Might be better to intentionally collapse a wall than for it to collapse _on_ her while trying to scale it.

It certainly looked like "up" was the way out, although she realized that could be because that was the only way she could _see_, asides from a plummet downwards. Exactly _how_ she'd get all the way up there remained to be seen, and the odds were firmly against it being intact up there. But she knew there was a long fall immediately below her, and that she _didn't_ know how wide that fall was. Getting out of the building would let her see its overall positioning, and up was the only direction where getting out wouldn't involve blasting a series of holes in an already mutilated building. To say nothing of the risk of gravity taking her on an involuntary trip if those holes triggered a collapse.

Granted, if anyone were _looking_ she'd be pretty obvious on top of a building, exposed to sight without any cover. But who'd look for her _there_? She'd have to be quite stupid to climb on top of a _toppled_, _mangled_ building in the first place. Or extraordinarily confident.

The sound of that refrigerator dropping would be hard to _miss,_ though. Oh well, that just meant staying in here would be an even _worse_ idea. If a welcoming committee came along, she'd just have to deal with it.

She was a little concerned over how exciting the possibility of an actual fight felt at that moment.

But nowhere _near_ concerned enough to reconsider.

Her hands returned to conscious control, having finished assembling and verifying the stability of the large coil of hair on the top of her head. She sighed. While she knew full-well that the military bun was intended to keep hair out of people's faces, and it could work as a legitimate fashion...She simply couldn't shake the feeling that she'd done something _wrong_ to herself. Once again, her vanity had proven itself resistant to her practicality.

Vanity would have to get over it this time.

A creaking sound snapped her out of introspection. If the building was still settling its weight, it was still in danger of falling. Time to get moving. But which way?

She realized that, since the building had tipped over, two of the "walls" would actually lead onto other floors. Unreasonable to expect those to be an improvement over her current situation. So the other two directions would be actual walls, and probably be better choices. But which of those two directions?

And come to think of it, which two ways _were_ those two directions?

She looked at the floor, specifically at the hole she'd come through. It was in the center of an edge, as opposed to a corner. She tapped a finger against her chin as she thought. Since a refrigerator had fallen _through_, it stood to reason that the hole would be flush with what had been the floor, as the refrigerator would have been when gravity held it there. So that identified the floor direction, as well as the ceiling. And of the other two walls, one of them still had a few drawers hanging on it from a couple pieces of twisted metal, and the floor could probably do without extra damage from things falling into it.

So there was one choice that didn't seem like a bad idea. She shrugged, readied herself to jump if need be, then tossed a hex at the center-top of that "wall". Material crumbled, and more moonlight came through the now clear space.

She repeated the process a few times, each time placing the hex so it would disintegrate portions of the wall at the top, rather than let big pieces fall to, or through, the floor she was standing on. Unfortunately this also meant a great deal of dust went into the air; by the time she reached the bottom of the wall it was almost a haze. She covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve again; she'd inhaled more than her fair share of particles already.

But _behind_ the haze, she saw something helpful: A reasonably-solid-looking section of wall a few dozen feet away, leading up to a wall on its right. A wall with several metal shelves coming out of it at regular intervals, and a couple pipes running through it. She turned her head sideways to verify her guess of what it was...and sure enough, it looked like the supports for an open ceiling. More importantly, the metal strips continued all the way up to what was presently the "top" of the building.

There was her way out.

Making the short jump across felt a little odd. She'd never have guessed she could _feel_ the air rushing against her hair, much less become accustomed to it, but the evidence suggested otherwise; some corner of her mind had expected a _nearly_-imperceptible pull on the sides of her scalp, which the bun simply didn't provide. Oh well, just one more thing to make some pumpkins pay for.

Climbing up the side was more annoying than difficult. The apparent ceiling supports had been close enough together that climbing them now was closer to climbing the rungs of a ladder than hoisting herself up repeatedly, which would've required more upper-body strength than she was used to exerting. As it was, she had to force herself to be patient with the much slower rate of vertical progress than her acrobatics supplied, while at the same time being thankful that there were no signs of anything collapsing while she made her way up.

Getting _onto _the roof turned out to be more of a chore, since the crash hadn't been kind enough to cleanly remove all the glass from the windows. Wasn't a big deal, though; she carefully applied a hex at a crosspiece of what had been a window frame, removing both that crosspiece and the glass around it. After feeling outside to be sure it was free of glass, and _then_ checking that it was wide enough for her to stand on, she hoisted herself up through the opening she had just made.

She stood up, and took a deep breath of the clean night air. The first step of her escape was complete.

No time to take a break, though; up next was the second step. She looked around. The view seemed level, confirming what her sense of balance had told her. In three directions, she could see clearly where the building ended. In the fourth, there appeared to be an angular dip in the distance, followed by a peak; that peak was too distant for her to get a good sense of what happened beyond it.

She slowly headed off in that last direction. Based on which direction the building fell, the many other buildings she had traversed would be off in that direction, supporting this one's weight. Which meant she could descend from one building into the next, and get onto the street from there. More importantly, that part of the building was in less danger from snapping off and falling the rest of the way to the ground.

She watched her step, but aside from the windows, the surface seemed sturdy enough to easily find safe places to step. At least, until she got near that dip she had seen. From there, the scene was considerably more chaotic: twisted pieces of metal jutting out of the building, mangled window frames, and a few clouds of dust still standing on top of the sections of wall they presumably came from.

Thinking an attempt to cross _that_ would be suicidal, she looked down one of the closer windows. It was hard to tell for _sure_, but it seemed clear through to the bottom, and below the "floor" was the roof of another building, sloping away. She guessed it made sense; the building she was on top of _had_ fallen over the other ones, so where it impacted the angled edges would've taken the most force and thus had the worst damage. She didn't _trust_ it, though; this close to the impact spot there should have been much more damage to—

She darted her eyes around nervously. Did she _really _just think that?

An ominous creak, and a few muffled snaps, accompanied the surface she was on slowly becoming angled as it descended on one side.

She cursed inwardly. She _had _jinxed it. Which had _long_ since stopped being ironic.

Trying to cross the urban wasteland in front of her seemed an even _worse_ idea now. That was the weakened portion, and thus where the building would snap off. Having the floor fall out from under her _this_ high would be even worse than falling through the floor she'd started this escape from. That was already too far to be survivable, and didn't include all the rough or sharp edges the building would get when it hit the ground. Plunging through the open window airway was pretty much the same, except the debris would come from above instead of below.

She frowned as she turned, reminding herself not to get used to how slowly the angle was shifting. There was only one way to go, she decided: Back the way she had just come. That'd be where the altitude loss was faster, so that was where her best chance of a _survivable_ descent was. With any luck she'd make a controlled descent instead of a fall.

She ran down the unsettling structure as it began emitting more frequent and louder creaking noises. She gently veered towards the nearby left edge, hardly comforted by the knowledge that she'd _already_ run across several buildings while _they_ were tipping over. Fortunately, she had a plan for _this_ one. All she needed to do was not fall through a window or hole, not trip on the shifting surface underfoot, and not mess up the timing.

All at the same time. Easy enough, she thought.

_So _easy, she almost missed the key moment while thinking it would be easy. Seeing the roofs of the adjacent street come into view, she shifted away from the edge. She then charged towards that same edge at an angle, brow furled in determination. As those roofs came back into view, she adjusted her angle slightly, a split second before making a full flip off the side.

She didn't quite believe she had made it when she touched down on her target roof, even while she was standing up by instinct. Hearing a continuous sound of creaking metal behind her, though, she quickly covered her ears with her hands. Even that wasn't enough to muffle the sound of snapping that she heard next.

The cacophony of metal, glass and drywall was felt much more than it was heard; the force almost knocked her off her feet since her arms weren't free for balance. As it was, she shifted a leg to adjust, before turning the movement into a crouch and then clinching her eyes shut.

It was only a few seconds before the noise and vibrations ceased, but it felt far longer. She took a series of deep breaths, thinking she'd had _way_ too much of a workout tonight. A few seconds later, she stood back up and looked over the edge of the roof behind her.

The downed section managed to look like it _used_ to be part of a building, barely. The clouds of dust masked the actual area of impact, but what she saw rising above showed deep cracks and the occasional hole in the walls. It also looked as though it had lost several feet in height; although her estimate of its original height was only a guess, the few straight sections on the roof were slanted enough to be noticeable, so it must have lost a lot of material off the bottom at _some_ point.

She shook her head in an effort to refocus. As glad as she was _not_ to be part of the scenery, there were other concerns. Even though the collapse wasn't caused by her own actions, noise of that magnitude was bound to draw attention. She briefly pondered whether it was better to get moving now and risk running into observers, or to wait it out and risk observers running into her. They _were_ more interested in Cyborg than herself, it was possible they'd move on when they didn't find him here.

"_JINX!"_

She flinched. So not _only _was Cyborg down there somewhere, he'd just _announced _the fact. Loudly. _That_ certainly changed the scenario; if they were looking for him then his _voice_ wouldn't be overlooked. At least he'd removed the uncertainty. As well as any use for subtlety.

_"WHAT?!"_ she responded with as much annoyance as she could muster, before taking a few more slow, deep breaths.

For a moment, there was no response.

"Down here," he finally said, a little less loudly than before.

She rolled her eyes, before walking to one of the corners opposite the wreckage and looking over the edge of the roof. The dust cloud hadn't spread that far yet, and the color of Cyborg's metallic frame stood in stark contrast to the rest of the scene.

It was also only two floors down to the street. She walked a little ways along the edge of the roof, then simply made a controlled drop down, landing only a few feet away from Cyborg.

The bear hug Cyborg gave her was unexpected. She'd have kept more distance, had she known it was coming.

"_You're alive!_" he said, as she grunted in surprise.

She thought the gesture was _sort of_ touching. But mostly awkward, and threatening to bring up fleeting memories. She felt it'd be cruel to outright _reject_ it though, so she needed to convince him to stop and let him think it was _his_ idea...

"You're not _hitting_ on me, are you?"

That did the trick. He released her half a second later, dropping her several inches down to the ground, and took a couple steps back. "No! I just...umm...What happened to your hair?"

She glared back at him. "Almost got _crushed_, couldn't move with the horns, could trip on loose hair, this is the compromise. Now what were you _thinking_ yelling like you were, we're trying _not_ to be found, remember?!"

"Only way I could find you," he answered.

She creased an eyebrow. "That wasn't _why_ you yelled, _was_ it?"

He looked like he was about to give an excuse, but he suddenly looked distracted. "Did you hear that?"

She hadn't noticed anything. She inhaled, then held her breath while she attempted to hear whatever it was Cyborg might be hearing, on the odd chance it was too soft to be heard over her own breathing. It was a couple seconds later that she first heard it: a soft rumble, vaguely resembling the sounds of an active thunderstorm. But storms didn't come so close to the ground that their thunder echoed between buildings and shattered husks thereof.

Come to think of it, the ground was shaking slightly, too. She hadn't actively noticed it, compared to the earth-shaking collapse just a couple minutes ago; but these were definitely originating from far away. And they were definitely moving. And definitely getting closer...

"OK," she said, "that's not good. We need to get moving, _now_."

"Right, it's not too far to the place where you and Starfire took down that giant pumpkin."

That was sounding like the exact kind of defensive approach that'd almost gotten her killed twice, with the same building. "I don't know about _you_, but _I'm_ tired of getting thrown into things while we're _failing_ to avoid confrontations. We should cut to the chase and head to the Tower _now_, not look for clues."

"But one of those bear things is there _right now_."

It sounded more like a suitably _direct_ avenue of investigation all of a sudden. "What? How do you know _that_?"

"Fixit's got these little robots with cameras, some are watching that place."

"Fixit? Who's...Never mind," she interrupted herself with a shake of her head, "you can tell me later. Is it alone?"

"Sure looked that way. He said it's just been circling the block, by itself."

Good enough for Jinx. "Alright, let's go. If we can figure out this pumpkin thing, or take the bear out preemptively, we're doing good."

Cyborg seemed taken aback. "You sure are aggressive all of a sudden."

"Yeah, well, I'm not going to wait for them to find more buildings for me to dodge. Not anymore."

By now, the rumbling sounds were close enough to confirm as pumpkin vines hitting the pavement at high speed. "And that means we're not waiting for them to get the drop on _us_. Let's go."


	14. Chapter 14

Cyborg and Jinx had managed to avoid any entanglements during their getaway. On Jinx's suggestion, he had rigged one of his rockets to behave like a time bomb, and planted it in an alleyway. The two of them were long gone by the time it went off, and the few kids they had seen went straight _past_ their hiding spot and towards the sound of the explosion.

Fixit had provided coordinates for where they were headed, a battlefield where Jinx and Starfire had taken down one of the giant pumpkin things. That had happened several hours ago, even though Cyborg felt it'd been _ages_ since the night started.

He was greeted by an unwelcome sight only three blocks away: a pool of bloody slime had spread out that far. It didn't have a uniform consistency, though: a thin layer of darkened crimson over the pavement was covered by a mat of centimeter-length brownish fibers. Cyborg checked the nearest sewer drain, which would normally have prevented a spread of this magnitude, and saw that the edge of the holes were covered with a dense collection of those brown fibers, rising up from the pavement to form a sort of dam.

"Well, the one we fought in the water had that white foam stuff for clotting," Jinx commented. "Maybe the larger terrestrial ones have this stuff instead."

"Yeah, or maybe the solid stuff on the inside takes longer to dissolve." Cyborg added. "I'm just happy it doesn't smell like the sewer one did, that was just nasty."

She shivered in disgust. "No kidding. Well, unless your equipment can pick up anything new here, we'd best keep going."

It took him a second to figure out that was a suggestion. "Just a second," he said as he started scanning. He had a slightly difficult time taking her seriously, after what she'd done to her hair. The pink coil on the back of her head simply lacked the commanding presence that horn-shaped projections on both sides of her head gave her. The whole thing where she gave herself an _alternate_ hairstyle seemed a little silly in itself, but if he knew much about hair he'd probably have some of his _own_. There were times when accusations of frivolity might be called for, but this wasn't one of them.

The panel on his forearm showed hints of a couple unidentified substances other than those he'd found in that sewer pumpkin hours ago; but he couldn't run a full chemical analysis without a lot more time. "There's a couple different things in there, but I got nothing useful about what they might _do_. Let's go."

They continued in what Cyborg had decided was "standard" procedure: Jinx covered the ground across the alley to the next block, then signaled when the coast was clear for his considerably-less-stealthy self to move up. It might not have been _perfect_, but it did a good job of preventing him from being spotted. And it went smoothly for the next two blocks.

But on the third, at the far edge of the last building before their destination...something was wrong. She froze for a second after peeking out past the building, then spent a moment looking left and right anxiously. She then turned around, darted behind a block of concrete debris near the mouth of the alley and crouched behind it.

A few seconds later, she glanced past her cover, then signaled Cyborg forward with her arm. Something was wrong. Even if he _hadn't_ noticed that her arm motion was more rigid and less relaxed than it had been, it'd be strange for her to signal him to intermediate cover; they'd agreed to wait until any observers were past before she'd signal.

So if it wasn't an observer that was concerning her...what was it?

Cyborg crept forward to Jinx's position. Looking past the piece of concrete, which was pretty easy since he was _taller _than it was, he saw what could only be described as a disaster. Half of the building appeared to have been shattered, debris of various sizes was strewn across what must have been a plaza around it, and the entirety of the street was covered with that bloody slime.

But even that looked better than what remained of the one-story-high pumpkin. _It_ was impaled on a sturdy spike of building, if the grotesquely coated shard piercing the top of its shell was any indication. On the ground below it was a large pile of some kind of pulp, and four shriveled brown lengths trailed from the bottom of the husk.

It was then that Cyborg noticed a foul smell. He didn't quite recognize it, but it made him think of pork that had gone rancid, along with the bitter scent of cabbage. Thankfully, the smell wasn't anywhere near overpowering; but he couldn't be sure how much of that was due to the distance to source, instead of potency.

"_Get down!_" Jinx whispered.

He complied, though crouching behind her so he couldn't be seen _over_ the debris did nothing to block the view from the left or right. "Why are we holding here?"

"You'll see," she said in a low, somber tone. Then she peered around the edge of the concrete, before darting forward several feet. She paused for a moment to look around, including a glance back at Cyborg, who'd peeked out from the edge to wait for her signal. She turned away, then sprinted towards a large L-shaped piece of debris, whose open side faced Cyborg. After she looked in all directions over it, she ducked down and motioned Cyborg forward.

He made his way forward, thinking he should have pressed harder on Jinx's decision to make an intermediate stop.

A wave of dizziness hit him as he passed out of the alley. Then, as he stood looking, he saw the source of Jinx's concern. Before, the street had been coated with the slime stuff. But now, he saw scattered areas devoid of red. Each such area had a gray mass in its center, and lines of brown fibers radiated away from the mass. Near each such mass was a large piece of building debris with markings, like a mess of deep, straight scratches. The markings were new, he was sure he'd have noticed them before...

Recalling Jinx's earlier impatience, Cyborg shook his head then rushed over to her, sitting with his back to the side of the debris opposite her. "Pretty sure that wasn't a hologram," he whispered. He ran some scans to check, and the results on his forearm panel confirmed his guess. "The only tech I'm reading, besides mine, is the city-wide jamming thing. But it's not anywhere _near_ strong enough to be responsible, or to keep me from seeing what _is_ responsible."

"Illusion," Jinx suggested. She seemed a little on-edge. "Were those corpses?"

Cyborg wasn't quite sure what she was referring to at first, but then he noticed that those grayish masses _did_ have a vaguely human shape. "Can't say I was really looking. Should be able to scan one of them from here, though."

He took a deep breath. "You seem nervous," he commented as he prepared his scanning equipment for the task. Having taken a more intentional look at the shape, it did _resemble_ a corpse, but...distended. With bloated skin, particularly where the face and belly would be, and with small streaks of dark orange amidst pale gray. He didn't want to look at it any more than he had to.

Jinx exhaled sharply. "We're dealing with someone who not only _does_ gross stuff like this, but someone able to _hide _it! What else have we missed, and what else are we _going_ to miss?"

Cyborg's eye widened as he got the results of his scan back. He also tried to ignore the feeling in the pit of his stomach. "It _is_ a human body, but it's been stuffed full of whatever is in that pumpkin blood. I don't know how, and I sure don't want to think about it."

"I'm more worried about 'why', honestly. Whatever the reason, it can't be good."

He shivered. "Good point. Afraid I'm not trained as a medical examiner, so all I can say is he died over twelve hours ago. Which...seems odd. I don't like saying this, but with as many kids as they've got, it'd be easy to get...well—"

"—to get _fresh _corpses, yeah. This whole 'mystery' thing keeps getting deeper and darker."

"No kidding. I don't even know where to _start_ with those weird markings."

Jinx looked at him with some confusion. "What markings?"

Cyborg took another deep breath, and forced himself to look at the nearest body. "See there," he said as he pointed, "above and to the right of the concrete behind it?"

Jinx squinted for a second. "Huh. Didn't notice that before, must've been distracted by the bodies and potential bear-thing."

Cyborg blinked. He'd nearly forgotten that thing was circling the main building, or at least it was when he had left Fixit. Didn't change the significance of his statement, though. "Well, the illusion hid the marks, but not the concrete itself; have to think the marks are important."

"Makes sense. It's weird though, this illusion is so oddly..._specific_. It covered up the missing blood on the streets, the bodies, these marks...but not the debris those marks were made on? And we could still see each other _across_ the boundary?"

He was no expert on magical illusions, but he did think it'd probably have been easier to disguise the entire area from the outside, instead of a few specific parts of it. But it did bring to mind another question..."Do you think the bear is illusory, a decoy maybe? The cameras didn't show any bodies, so either this all happened _very_ recently, or they were affected by the illusion too."

Jinx was silent for a moment. "No, I don't think so. If it were a decoy, it'd be here to keep people from approaching. It'd make more sense to use one of those hard-to-miss giant pumpkins for the shape of a decoy, instead of a bear thing that we've only actually seen one of. Anyway, I can't get a good look at those marks from here, we need to get closer; good thing we're unlikely to have an invisible assailant."

Lacking any better idea, Cyborg looked around for any signs of a _visible_ assailant, and found none. "Alright then, let's get over there."

Jinx checked for herself that the coast was clear. She then darted across the short intervening length to the nearest marked section of concrete, with Cyborg closely behind. He kept watch for anyone appearing, which made it easy for him to avoid looking at the bloated corpse only a couple feet away.

"They're runes," Jinx eventually proclaimed.

Cyborg's mind predictably went to video games first. "You mean like magical rocks?" He opted to focus his sight on the runes in question, to keep the body in his peripheral vision.

His peripheral vision also noticed Jinx tilting her head, a move that would've been far easier to notice if she still had the horns coming out the side of her head. "I can't say for sure whether it's _magical_ or not, but I mean the systems of writing."

"Huh, " he said in the moment that allowed his curiosity to surface. "What do they say?"

She shook her head. "I can't read them."

He looked directly at her, now. "You can't?" he said with surprise.

She looked back at him. Her frown told him that she took that as a challenge. But a second later, she took a deep breath and relaxed her eyebrows. "Look," she said as she rolled her eyes, "runes aren't a _language_, they're a series of _alphabets_. And I don't know what language these two lines are supposed to be. For all I know, they could be random characters chosen to 'look cool' instead of having any actual meaning."

"Oh," was all the response Cyborg could come up with, before he chuckled sheepishly. "Learn something new every day, I guess."

"The weirdest part here, is that this particular alphabet is the Elder Futhark. It fell out of common use over a _millennium_ ago. If there _is_ some meaning to them, it's from _long_ ago."

The conversation was ended by the sound of a high-pitched hiss. In the second it took him to realize he was supposed to be looking out, Jinx had already ducked out of the way of a sphere of glowing black energy. Cyborg quickly armed his sonic cannon and aimed in the direction of the ball's origin, as Jinx readied a couple hexes.

He saw it standing forty feet away. It was clearly the same kind of bear thing as the one they'd dealt with earlier, with silver-tipped black bristles for fur. This one, however, beat Cyborg's own height by a couple feet, and carried a definite sneer where the earlier one had no facial expression worth remembering.

Then it made one of those weird barks, and—

"**So **_**you **_**are the ones wasting our time, wasting away our world.**"

Cyborg was reasonably certain he hadn't actually _heard _those words, nor did he recognize the deep, rumbling voice in his head. Recalling his potential auditory damage, he asked Jinx for confirmation. "Did _you _hear—"

Another bark, this one with a hint of a snarl in it. **"**_**Spare **_**me the quivering of your disgusting flesh. Your insolence is intolerable, your blasphemy inexcusable."**

Cyborg frowned. "Let's blast 'em," he whispered to Jinx.

He fired his sonic cannon at it while Jinx threw a couple hexes at the ground under it, but it simply stepped to the side, without taking its eyes off of them. In defiance of its apparent bulk, it was agile enough to avoid their attack entirely. Then it barked thrice, but with a strange set of varying inflections on each.

He heard a light cracking sound, and noticed Jinx gasp and backflip away. He also saw one of those lines of runes glow a neon green, and the body inflating slightly, with bright orange cracks glowing as the skin broke...

He turned to run a second too late. The concussive force of the explosion hurled him through the air, and into what remained of the central building. He _felt _colliding with what was left of the wall more than he _heard_ it, but hearing it at _all_ meant his audio reception hadn't been blown offline. Yet.

Cyborg heard another bark as he picked himself up off the ground. "**That animal husk served against defilers. The soul once within is now granted the forgiveness of the Green One. Cease your resistance, that your **_**own**_** redemption may come easier.**"

Jinx snorted. "_That's_ your offer, 'die quicker'?"

An annoyed bark. **"Do not waste our time, your pleas are nothing."**

"_Pleas?!_" Jinx scoffed.

It raised an arm over its head, showing the three ivory claws extending an inch from its paw. Jinx took a step away from it, and Cyborg aimed his sonic cannon at the large piece of concrete in front of it. But instead of charging over the barrier as either of them had expected, it made a quick series of slashes with both arms at the concrete.

Then another series of oddly inflected barks. A wall of ice, with a deep orange glow, grew up from the debris and stretched towards Jinx, forming myriad razor-sharp edges on its surface.

Cyborg's instinct to fire kicked in before he remembered to adjust his aim, and the blue-and-white beam predictably pulverized the piece of concrete. To his surprise, the ice stopped growing; In fact, its glow abruptly died out and its previously smooth sheets were covered with tiny cracks as the entire structure began to melt.

Jinx, who had apparently evaded the ice razor wall by sprinting the thirty or so feet from where she was to where Cyborg was now, stood behind him. "Pretty sure it doesn't understand English," she said. "Did you see where it went?"

"No," he answered, "I lost track of it when all that concrete filled the air." He checked around with his infrared vision mode, but didn't find it. Of course, the _first_ bear thing had barely shown up on that mode before, so it was a long shot to begin with. "Still can't find it. Got a plan?"

"Keep it moving, it needs those runes for its spells, so we don't give it the chance to make them."

"Would explain pawing at the trash. How are we gonna _beat _it, though? The _other_ bear was fast and strong enough, and _this _one's faster and bigger."

"Same way we handled the other one, pull the rug out from under it. Or...we could drop buildings on _it,_ for a change of pace. Look, we don't have time for a committee, if it sneaks up on us—"

Her sentence was cut short by the wall next to her exploding outward, throwing her several feet away. She landed in a heap, but Cyborg didn't have the chance to react to anything other than the set of claws lunging at his face.

He ducked under the clawed paw, and threw a heavy punch at the hard-to-miss body with a yell. The bear thing didn't make a sound, but did shift its weight on one of its legs. Right before snapping that leg forward to kick him. Cyborg staggered back a couple steps from the force.

It raised an arm to strike, but stopped with its arm in the air. A sadistic, almost evil grin crept onto its face, and the three claws receded into its paw with a soft sound of scraping crystal; like the metallic ring of a sword being unsheathed, but lingering on a few specific high pitched frequencies. The trivia center in Cyborg's mind informed him that bear claws aren't retractable. Just in case he hadn't already figured out that this thing only superficially _resembled_ a bear.

It leaned forward with a wide horizontal swing of its paw, which Cyborg hurriedly stepped back to avoid, before taking a single step forward to maintain its balance. It barked again, before making a punch with its other arm, and Cyborg experienced a most unusual form of multitasking. It did seem the thing conveyed its entire message at the same time, and he only "heard" it in its mind at normal sentence length...but it didn't seem to require any conscious effort to understand, either; he could hear it clearly without distraction mid-fisticuffs.

**"I wonder, metal man..."**

Cyborg simply leaned out of the way of the comparatively clumsy blow, and countered with a jab of his own. His fist contacted pointed fur, and his opponent recoiled; but when Cyborg attempted to follow up with a stronger punch, the creature swung its arm down, knocking Cyborg's out of the way. It then smoothly reversed the motion into a backhand, hitting Cyborg on the side of his head.

**"...are you an animal that partially rejected flesh..."**

He consciously disregarded his internal alarm as well as the pain. He defensively swung his arm off to the side, and successfully blocked the thing's attempt to strike him upside the head _again_ with that same arm. The look of surprise on its face was only a minor reward: it had leaned forward for its failed attempt, putting its head in range; Cyborg felt obligated to deliver an uppercut with his free arm.

**"...or are you another moving statue, adorned with meat in mockery?"**

It grunted in pain, and stumbled back a few steps. Cyborg noticed that the grunt sounded significantly louder in one "ear", even though the creature being directly in front of him would normally mean the sound should be equally loud. This confirmed Cyborg's suspicion about his internal alarm: it was telling him that his audio reception had been damaged, and his hearing was impacted.

This wasn't the time to be worrying about it, though. He wasn't making much headway with the punching routine, so he deployed his sonic cannon and fired at the thing.

If the roar was any indication, the attack was clearly successful. It sounded more angry than pained, though. The creature dashed forward against the beam, and kicked Cyborg's arm hard enough to force it to point skyward. Then with a single motion, it turned its wrist, extended a single claw, and thrust it towards Cyborg's exposed elbow.

He yelled as the claw effortlessly punctured the outer plating of his arm chassis. He had a split second to notice the look of rancor on the monster's face, before it silently jerked its arm up, tearing his arm open all the way to the end and effectively gutting his sonic cannon with a single motion.

Cyborg was too preoccupied with the pain to maintain his footing, and the next kick tossed him through the air a few feet and he landed on his stomach. The creature was apparently content to lumber towards him slowly, and he made no attempt to stop it. Not because he had given up, but because he'd seen some pink movement through the gap between the thing's legs. Whatever she was going to do, she could use all the time she could get, and that meant Cyborg wasn't going to prompt the monster to move more quickly.

As the creature approached, Cyborg had the opportunity to examine the results of his sonic blast. The fur had been blasted away, but under it...Cyborg guessed it resembled some kind of black-and-gray wood, though it certainly hadn't _felt _like wood under there when he punched the thing. The wooden fibers around the edge of the shallow wound, if it could be called a wound, were frayed and warped.

Cyborg groaned as the creature set a foot on his back, pinning him to the ground. He tried to push back against the weight, but his mechanical muscles were optimized for his _limbs;_ his back simply didn't have the kind of force he needed. He considered using his arm and legs to unsettle the monster, but it _had_ just demonstrated how readily it could disable his limbs, and that hurt. He decided he'd only have one shot, so he'd wait for Jinx to give him an opportunity.

Another bark, this one with a patronizing tone. Though the bark itself was louder in one ear than the other, the words in his head weren't affected.

**"I see your tenacity was not exaggerated. Even so, the power granted by the Green One has allowed me to eclipse you. You would still be intact had you not chosen further resistance."**

Not willing to waste a clever remark on an opponent unable to understand the words, he chose a frown as his response.

Another bark. **"The same could not be said of your companion, but her death would have come with less pain. Now, she must be broken, lest she affront the Green One further."**

Cyborg didn't appreciate the few seconds of silence that followed. His efforts to ignore the sheer pain sparking in his forearm didn't benefit from the lack of distraction. Shifting his focus to possible repair scenarios helped only slightly, but it _did _help. He figured that with a couple minutes to work, he could get his arm operable and compensate for his lopsided audio reception. He'd need to replace the forearm to get his sonic cannon functioning, though; good thing the Tower was already on the itinerary.

A bemused bark. **"Nearly impossible to pin down. Clearly the lucky one of you two. Pity the plan isn't to catch **_**her**_** and purge **_**you**_**."**

Cyborg saw the flash of purple in the distance, and carefully turned his functioning hand to face its palm against the street. The creature's posture lurched forward when the hex blindsided it, which Cyborg took as his cue.

With a yell, he shoved his working arm against the surface, enough to throw the monster off his back and face first onto the pavement. Cyborg quickly got to his feet, not expecting the thing to stay put.

"Get _over _here!" Jinx yelled, as another hex flew towards the bear-thing. It had resumed a standing position by the time the hex hit the street in front of it, letting gravity plunge it into the sewer or whatever else happened to be below.

Cyborg dutifully jogged towards Jinx, holding his damaged arm against his chest with his other arm. He then saw Jinx cross her arms, then quickly spread them with a yell, sending an abnormally wide hex at what remained of the building.

The purple energy slammed through the base of the already-ravaged building. A deep rumble filled the air as drywall started to collapse and fall to the ground. As Cyborg watched, mentally reconciling the direction of what his hampered hearing _heard_ with what he _saw_, he noticed that the pieces falling down were much smaller than the most of the debris that littered the street when they had arrived.

A few seconds later, the cacophony stopped. Nearly a fifth of what had remained of the building was now a huge pile of rubble. A pile centered on the hole Jinx had created under the bear-thing.

"Turnabout is fair play, huh?" he commented.

"Hell yes," she confirmed. The she looked at his wrecked arm. "Are you going to make it?" she asked, sounding concerned. He had almost missed the split second where her eyes widened at the sight of the damage.

"Yeah. I'll need a couple minutes to rig some backups, but my arm and hearing will be workable then. Cannon'll have to be replaced, but we're going to the Tower anyway." Now that he had a few seconds to collect his thoughts, some implications just occurred to him. "You didn't _happen_ to crush anyone _alive_ in there, did you?"

She shook her head. "I was here when that pumpkin split the building down the middle with a single swipe. Anyone who survived that kind of force and _wasn't_ pushed out a window by the shockwave, would have had this _demon _to contend with. So what'd it say to you, I only heard the barking after the rock massage."

He took a deep breath. "Called me a metal man, mentioned _another_ 'moving statue', said I was tenacious, lots of crap about a 'Green One', said you were lucky, and the plan was to catch me and kill you."

"_'Lucky'?!_"

"Yeah, kinda delusional wasn't it?"

"OK, we need to keep going. Which way is the Tower?"

"Umm..." He checked his internal navigation, and was displeased with the results. "That way?" he suggested meekly, pointing to what remained of the nearby building that happened to lie in the way of a direct route.

She sighed. "Figures. Come on."

"Wait. You know this _hurts_, right?" he said, indicating his arm with a nod of his head. He felt like he was whining a bit, but he certainly didn't want to get into another fight with his arm tied behind his back. Or hanging limply at his side, for that matter.

"We'll find somewhere safe along the way, don't worry about that. I'm pretty sure the bears are the ones in charge now, and the pumpkins are going to know exactly where that one _is_. Worry about _that_."

He had to agree. Getting ambushed in the middle of working on his systems would be spectacularly bad. "Good point. Let's go, then."

She headed around the building at a pace just short of jogging, and he followed. He thought her choice of speed was odd, since she was clearly capable of going much faster, but he didn't want to push her. Particularly since he didn't think he could keep up with her sprinting for long even if he was in good condition, and the inability to move both arms freely cut back how much momentum he could harness.

They were a short ways around the corner of what was now a ruin, when he felt the ground under his feet vibrating. He and Jinx both stopped, as the vibrations grew stronger and the sound of a deep rumble became apparent. Then, with an overwhelming loud crash, the entire pavement shattered and fell several feet down.

Jinx displayed her cat-like sense of balance by using all four limbs to remain standing as her footing fell off at an angle, taking her with it. Cyborg simply fell over, though he managed to keep his head from hitting anything.

As Cyborg found enough level space to get back on his feet, he realized the loud crash had turned into a series of smaller crashes. He turned to look behind him, in the direction of what had been the building...and past the rising dust cloud, the structure was falling onto, or into, the ground.

By the time the sounds had stopped, he could only recognize the building as the debris that had overflowed the street and started to fill the crevice he and Jinx were presently in the bottom of. The rubble stopped flowing, which he supposed was a good thing, but it didn't bode well for the fate of the city block. Jinx covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve as the dust started to float down, and Cyborg did the same.

A defiant bark. **"The earth itself acknowledges the Green One! It defies even your hard prison on top of itself."**

Then, another bark. This one had a different, and lower, pitch to it though; and Cyborg couldn't quite tell due to his hearing impairment but it _seemed_ to have originated from a different direction.

No words were carried, but barely a second later the bark indicating their attacker responded, and again no words were carried. They alternated back and forth five more times, with shifting tones.

The last bark in the chain was from the distance. The fury behind it was almost palpable. Then, silence reigned for a few seconds.

A moment later, Cyborg saw movement along the ground. A wide swath of bright red, so thin it might as well have been a film over the ground, was flowing across the ground and around obstacles in defiance of gravity. He was standing on a piece of road that was slightly elevated, so at least the stuff wasn't streaming over his feet.

"Is that the blood that was in the bodies?" Jinx asked.

Cyborg's instinctive move to bring up his scanner was answered with a surge of pain. He grunted in surprise for only a second. "Sorry," he gasped, "scanner was in the arm. Can't tell ya."

Then there was a bark, the pitch indicating the nearby creature. **"Your existence has been ordained to continue briefly. Proceed to your 'tower', that I may rectify this. Or wait here for brevity to expire."**

Cyborg heard only silence for a few seconds. He couldn't be _sure_ that the silence was authentic, though, and his doubts were reinforced by the way Jinx cocked her head and looked out the corner of her eyes.

She then turned her head, and ran off in that direction, towards where two edges of fragmented pavement met. His unspoken question of where she was going answered itself as he saw her destination: the debris collected in that corner formed a mound high enough to reach out of the pit. She promptly scaled it, then turned around to look across the field of devastated asphalt.

"OK," she half-yelled after a few seconds, "it's gone. Let's get out of here before..._anything_ shows up."

Cyborg walked in her general direction; carefully stepping on flat, large pieces of street amidst the small pieces of debris that were beginning to form a layer as he went. He imagined most of the world's post-pubescent population weighed more than Jinx did, and he was significantly heavier than most or all of _them_; those little pieces wouldn't support his mass. He had no idea how deep the stuff went, and crunching all the way to the bottom struck him as a particularly dumb way to find out. He had a mental recall of a scene in the Lord of the Rings movies, where Legolas was walking on top of the snow everyone else was trudging through.

He shook his head in an attempt to focus. "So, I can't say I've ever seen you do a lot of _climbing,_" he commented to get his mind back on the immediate task. "Couldn't you, like, _jump_ all the way up there?"

During the half-second of silence, Cyborg imagined she was giving him one of those skeptical looks. "Of course _I_ could. How about _you_?"

He realized, at her prompting, that he hadn't thought far enough ahead to figure out how he was going to get _out_ of this hole in the ground. Climbing up an irregular slope would be difficult enough since he only had one hand to use. "Oh yeah," he admitted. Then he sighed. "I tell ya, tonight has _not_ been my best performance."

"Yeah, well, as hard as they've been trying to lock you down, it's not like you had a fair chance."

He reached the edge of the mound. Jinx's boots had made noticeable impressions in the softer portions of the mound, making it easy for him to see the solid pieces underneath. Another thing that would've been harder if she hadn't given the climb a trial run herself.

The climb itself was still rather painstaking. It was a repeated series of finding a piece of surface in arms' reach that could support his weight, brushing debris off the top of it, then grabbing it with his functional hand and pulling himself towards it enough to plant a foot on an intermediate piece of footing. The most difficult part, though, was not letting go when his gutted arm hit a surface and reignited the pain.

Once he finally reached the top, he bent over and took several deep breaths. On some level he was aware that the relief was only psychological, his mechanical musculature lacking the blood-oxygen reliance of organic muscles; but relief was relief, and he wasn't going to dispute it.

"Not to sound unsympathetic," Jinx said after a few seconds, "but we need to leave, like, _already_. Are you going to make it?"

Cyborg stood up straight, and took one more deep breath. "Yeah, but until I get my arm fixed I'd rather avoid trying to climb any more heaps like that one."

"How about stairs?"

He looked at her, and tried not to stare at her hair. "Stairs should be no problem. Haven't we been in enough tall buildings, though?"

She snorted. "I wish. But we're continually losing options."

Cyborg sighed. "Right, we can't afford to be picky."

"Best get moving, then. Come on," she said as she walked off, in the general direction of Titans Tower. "I have an idea where we can hide long enough for you to do your maintenance stuff."

"Alright," he said as he followed behind her, holding his nonfunctional arm with his functional one. "Hope that goes better than the _rest_ of tonight, I'm sick of digging myself into deeper holes."

"You and me both."

"Like all this bear...stuff. What's a 'Green One', anyway?"

She turned to look at him over her shoulder. "That, I have an idea about..."


	15. Chapter 15

"Let me get this straight," Cyborg said as he worked on his arm at the wooden table, with...whatever welding tool was integrated in his _other_ arm. Jinx found it slightly disquieting that he could simply _detach_ an entire arm, then go to work on it like it was just another electronic device. "You _broke_ into an ancient temple, found _doomsday plans_ on a mural, and _**left **__them there_?"

She rolled her eyes and shook her head, as the smell of metallic smoke reminded her why they had time to have a discussion. "What did you _expect _me to do?" she demanded. "Haul the entire _wall_ all the way to the front _door_, or _blast _an irreplaceable piece of _history_?" While at the time she had briefly considered separating the mural into _pieces _she could haul out, it was painted on plaster that was already showing signs of water damage. She had no doubt that it'd be pulverized if she tried to partition it with hexes...not that she'd expect Cyborg to appreciate that, even if she bothered to tell him.

The noise of light electrical crackling stopped, and he turned to look at her. "And the doomsday part didn't bother you at all?" He said earlier that he'd already managed to compensate for whatever was going on with his hearing, some volume increase algorithm. That he evidently heard her over the sound of his equipment verified his success.

"No!" she yelled anyway. "Things around that age often _claim_ doom of some sort, assuming no one will actually _risk_ doom to verify it. It's no different than those boxes for closed-circuit security cameras that don't actually _have_ cameras, it's presumed security."

"OK...so what'd it say?"

She'd expected him to argue the point, but she was only caught off guard for a quarter of a second. She made a show of turning her eyes towards the ceiling as she mentally replayed the years-old events, in case more realizations came to her. Jungle, clearing, unmarked ruins, tunnel hidden behind a boulder, plaster mural, taking photographs, resources on Mayan glyphs, translation attempts..."A lot of it was too worn to make out. Mentioned a deity, called the 'Green One', who would do..._something _to the world so it could do..._something_ to nature. Six...jaguar-men, I think...spread its spirit. Pretty sure that means those bear demons, obeying its commands."

"How do you get from 'jaguar' to 'bear'?"

"It's a little bit of a stretch, but this was in Central America, and—"

"—right, bears aren't indigenous to most of there."

"...Yeah, so whoever did the mural might have had no idea what a bear looked like and had to improvise." That was an oddly specific factoid for a electronics expert to have so readily. "How do you know so much about _bears_?"

"Umm...when you get turned _into_ one, you kinda get curious," he said awkwardly. "Can we get over this _later_?" he added, as he got back to work on his arm, looking back at the table it was placed on.

She looked at him with one eyebrow creased. "Fine," she said, reminding herself of priorities, as the crackling resumed. She was sure listening to Cyborg tell a story he didn't want to tell would be a lot less stressful, but getting killed would _seriously_ mess up her calendar. "The next section on the mural was..._really_ faded. I could only make out how it started: how to call the 'king of jaguar-men', I assume one of the bears is designated leader over the rest. The last section was like 'Reader beware, the Green One will end an unworthy world', boilerplate doomsaying basically."

The crackling stopped again. It took a couple seconds for Jinx to notice Cyborg directing a level stare at her. Which was very unnerving with the solid red eye supporting it. "Faded."

"Yes."

"_Really_."

"_Yes._"

He creased his eyebrow. She must've taught him that one by accident. "It wasn't really faded, was it?" he half-accused.

She growled. "_Now _you get attentive. _No! _I wasn't _intending_ to end up there, I wasn't _supposed _to be there, and I had to take off before I could photograph the whole thing, so I have _no idea_ what it was saying there! Are you _happy_?" She was quickly asking herself where that outburst came from, where her composure _went_, and why she _told_ him so much.

Cyborg's surprised silence only lasted a couple seconds. "Not really," he answered calmly. "Was it something I said?"

"Yes—_no!_" she corrected herself, fighting her emotions' desire to run wild. "Our first and _only_ real clue to this whole thing, and we don't have all of it because I _screwed up;_ some _police_ tracked _me_ down through a jungle, I'm _supposed_ to be _better_ than that, damn it!" She had to take a couple deep breaths after such a long sentence, all the while cursing inwardly at her dismal attempt to rein herself in. Now she felt irrational _and_ egotistical.

She was still silently fuming when Cyborg responded a few seconds later. "OK, so we're not perfect. That doesn't mean we won't _win_. When I was briefly the leader of Titans East, I lost my whole team to Brother Blood the first day; and even the team _here_ couldn't stop him. It was down to _me_, and despite my screw ups I managed to beat him...in a way that I couldn't _imagine_ if I hadn't been there."

"I _heard,_" Jinx commented dismissively.

"How did—never mind," Cyborg said, "Point is, we're going to _keep_ punching probability in the face until it keels over and we beat this thing. Even if it takes what's left of the night to do it—"

"Wait." The phrase had triggered something in her brain. "What time _is _it?"

"Huh? Oh, 3:45AM."

She sighed. "Great, I'm turning into an old lady, get cranky if I stay up past my bedtime." She was trying not to grin, though; it'd explain her emotional...sensitivity, and would certainly be an improvement over possibly losing her mind. Being stuck in a city-wide mind control maelstrom for hours, the possibility existed.

He blinked. "How long have you been awake?"

"About nineteen hours."

"You woke up at nine?"

"Yeah, I got up early—_late_." She sighed at the brief lapse of recollection. "The whole diurnal cycle thing is kind of a bitch."

"Heh. Well with any luck, we'll get this thing taken care of soon. I'm not sure _how _we're going to get across the bay to the Tower...but once we're _there _the rest should easy. Kinda doubt centuries-old monsters are gonna be hacking security systems."

She rolled her eyes. "You probably just jinxed it."

He smirked. "I figured, since _you're_ coming anyway..."

She let out a chuckle. Not so much as a response to Cyborg's incredibly lame implied pun..."I'd normally say leave comedy to the bears, but tonight? It's really a tossup."

Cyborg winced. "Ow."

She smiled briefly, before shaking her head quickly. _Focus_. "OK, amateur hour at the comedy club can wait. Are you done with your arm?"

"Yeah, just need to reattach it now."

"Good. Do that. We've got a city to save, an abstract concept to oppress, an array of gourds to squash, and ursine manifestations to brutalize."

"_Now_ you're talking!"

She found it significantly easier to watch him connect his arm back to his body, compared to seeing him use his own tools on his own limb. He simply held the shoulder portion to the corresponding socket, and with a magnetic snap it was pulled into place. He waved his arm around, made a fist, extended various combinations of digits..."All good," he reported. "So when were you in Central America, anyway?"

At least he hadn't made a joke about being "rearmed". She briefly considered how to define the time span, and decided on the related events: "Between when you blew up the academy, and when you went out to Steel City."

Cyborg rubbed his chin. "That _would_ explain why you didn't show up the rest of the year...but...um..._why_?"

"If you had a teacher who was obsessed with an ex-girlfriend of yours," she asked in an annoyed tone, "how long would _you_ hang around?" It may not have been the most _rational_ decision she'd ever made, but she refused to let every moment of the day remind her of Cyborg and what had transpired between the two of them. It hurt more than enough when it actually happened.

Cyborg shuddered. "Good point," he said uncomfortably.

"Any _other_ questions?" she prompted quickly.

"Yeah, actually. How come you didn't mention any of this sooner?"

"I didn't make the connection until the _thing_ mentioned 'Green One'. That was a particularly odd part of the mural, but repeated a few times; it took so much effort to figure out from the various faded copies of the phrase that it was easy to recall."

"Makes sense, remembering the most involved part. What was so odd about it?"

"It was Mayan script, which didn't distinguish green from blue. So the _literal_ translation was something like...'The one of blue-green of tree not blue-green of ocean'. It seemed _really_ strange at the time...but if it were a transliteration of a title from another language, one that differentiated blue and green—"

"—it'd have to express it _somehow_, gotcha. Wouldn't want to mix up Green One and Blue One. Don't know if Beast Boy or Raven would be more offended."

What a perfect opening. "Pretty sure it'd be Raven. Speaking of, are we ready to find and/or save her _yet_?" She figured Raven would find _that_ meeting as unappealing as Jinx herself was finding the thought of it, but it was due and should keep Cyborg moving.

He quickly straightened his posture. "You _bet_!" he proclaimed.

Right before a low metallic ring danced at the edges of her hearing.

Cyborg's demeanor shifted back to slightly skittish. "What was that?"

"Stairwell," she calmly explained, as she started to walked across the carpet towards the curtains on the wall. "Someone just flung open one of the doors leading into it, and the sound of the door hitting the wall carried through the metal railing of the stairs."

"It's gotta be _close_, if we heard it through the closed door and down the hall!"

"I propped the door to the stairwell on this floor open, so we could hear them sooner. You've seen the kids move; even if their stilted movements _don't_ have problems with stairs, we're a lot faster than they are. We've got time, but we should still hurry." Just in time, she thought; the _next _question would've been why the demons were described in Mayan script but used Elder Futhark themselves. The connection between the two scripts, separated by half a millennium and the Atlantic Ocean, _was_ an interesting academic matter, but there wasn't enough time to do justice to the subject; practicality is what they needed now.

"...OK. You said before that you picked this place for a reason. Would it happen to do with how we're going to get out since the stairwell is blocked?"

With suitably dramatic timing, she pulled the curtain off, revealing the glass double door behind it. "Yes." The building across the street was getting another few floors added; scaffolding dominated the view. Which might also explain the makeshift curtain rod above the only window-equivalent item in the whole room; but this was no time for critiquing interior design, either. Titans Tower was visible in the distance, framed by wooden support beams.

"Cool," Cyborg commented from behind her. "So...how are we going to get over there? That stuff'll snap if I try to walk across it."

She frowned, and crouched on the floor so she could see the top of the construction work through the glass. Her plan _had_ been to make a section of it fall over to connect the roofs, but it'd been so long since she had to worry about weight that she hadn't considered Cyborg's. There was certainly enough height to it that she could make a wooden beam fall to form a makeshift bridge, but only _she_ could cross it; she'd have to find some other way to get Cyborg across.

It was then that she noticed an odd shape at the upper-right corner of her view, a stripe of metal in alternating red and white colors. She moved her head to the left, bringing into view the large industrial mechanism attached to the side of the far building. It ended in what appeared to be a hook.

"How about the crane?" she inquired.

She heard Cyborg move closer. "Yeah, those things move a _lot_ more weight than I have. But...do _you_ know how to operate a crane?"

Gizmo had once made the rest of the H.I.V.E. Five watch a short film entitled 'Forklift Driver Klaus'; that was the extent of her heavy industrial knowledge. And as it was a sheer parody of work safety films, there was little _actual _knowledge to it. "No."

"Darn. _I_ know how to work one, I did a lot of heavy lifting—in more than one sense of the word–when Titans Tower was being built. If we had our communicators I could maybe try to talk you through it when you got to the control cabin, but..."

"You mean if _I_ had _my_ communicator."

"Same thing. Look, there'll probably be three sets of controls; one turns the crane left and right, another raises or lowers it, and the last extends or retracts it. You get the hook part over here and I'll grab on."

She nodded in agreement. "Then I set you down on the other roof, and we figure our way out from there."

He looked askance at her. "Bet you have a plan _there_, too."

"Sort of. We had to stop going by there once the security was reinforced to the point that _Mammoth_ was inconvenienced trying to get in, so it should keep the kids out until their pumpkin backup comes around. We can get out through the trapdoor in the basement."

"_Another_ place with a hidden basement exit?" Cyborg asked skeptically.

"Yeah, same company owned the warehouse too. Or shared parent company, something like that; we don't have time to discuss fine points of property ownership."

"Right."

She quietly opened the double door, took a step through the gently flowing air, and looked over the edge of the balcony. Her original plan had involved cutting loose a piece of scaffold to form a bridge; but the scaffolding started a few floors _below,_ where the actual roof stopped. She could easily traverse the gap acrobatically, since Cyborg wouldn't be taking the same route. That way, she figured, she wouldn't be detected until she started up the crane. Every second a pumpkin response team _wasn't_ sent was another second they had to get on with the...she supposed it would be called a _mission_, now.

After locating a landing spot clear of obstructions, she glanced behind her shoulder. More than enough room for the running jump required. Cyborg was standing there near the doors, but he only lingered for a split second before stepping out of the way. She walked in, keeping a straight line and facing the same direction as she mentally measured the distance.

"You're not going to hit the scaffold if you _jump_ over there, are you?" he asked.

She continued forward until she was near the far wall of the apartment, before turning around and responding. "Nope." That was why she wanted such a long running jump, after all. She could handle the _vertical _drop to the other roof from just a few steps away from the balcony, but she'd have to deal with the scaffolding, and probably in a destructive and obvious way.

"Want me to 'remove' the railing?" he offered.

She paused. "Wouldn't hurt. Can you do it _without_ making a lot of noise, or light, or a mess on the floor?" If a flash of purple light was more subtle, she'd have hexed it into rust herself. It still wasn't _necessary_, but far be it for her to stop him from being helpful.

While he turned around and cracked his knuckles, which she wasn't sure should be physically _capable_ of popping, she quickly went over her high level plan for the larger mission: Get to the Tower, beat the crap out of pumpkins and bears. She sighed, realizing it wasn't _much_ of a plan. But it was important to remember that at some point they would _have_ to fight the pumpkins they were presently running from. But blasting them at the Tower would serve some _purpose_; whereas when she and Starfire destroyed the big one in the city it just made a messy _backdrop _for Jinx to flee and Starfire to be captured.

The sound of the railing's two thick horizontal bars snapping from Cyborg's application of brute force was soft from this distance. Almost as gentle as the creaking that followed, as he bent the left and right sides inwards. The railing was no longer an obstacle, and its removal was sufficiently subtle. Anything that saw or heard _that_ would have an easier time noticing _her_ when she landed on the other roof.

Cyborg stepped back inside, out of the way, then with a small smile and slight bow he gestured toward the door, as if inviting her to go first.

"Thank you," she answered, before starting her run. A couple seconds later she was soaring through the air, with sufficient speed to land on the opposite roof without a problem.

Other than the horizontal board that was far too close to her flight path.

Her involuntary gasp didn't quite sound right, probably due to the velocity, but she had other concerns. She pushed against the bottom edge of the board and then grabbed onto it, spinning herself around it. Just before her momentum was perfectly vertical, she released the board, leaving her twirling towards the sky and slightly forward.

A second or two later, she landed on the roof, alighting with her usual grace despite the spontaneous recovery. Her apparent descent into fatigue halted by the sudden jolt of adrenaline, she turned to look back at the balcony she'd just left. Cyborg's face seemed startled, presumably because of the fancy landing maneuver. She shrugged her shoulders in response, and walked off in the direction of the crane.

Infrequent columns of steel jutted up from the roof; Jinx supposed they were extensions of the primary supports in the existing building. Otherwise, the site resembled most other construction areas Jinx had seen: wooden framework in place on half of the roof, stacks of identical boards laying level around the other half, and irregular piles of odd-sized shapes and tarp placed wherever the first guy left the first piece. The use of wood right next to steel drew an odd look from her, but she was no architect; for all she knew it could just be a new cost-saving measure.

The control cabin for the crane was quite ordinary by comparison. The shape resembled the front half of a car more than anything else, complete with a clear transparent plate where the windshield would be. It wasn't a steering wheel she saw when she entered, though. Instead, she was greeted by a square console, with three levers and two buttons. Conveniently they were all labeled: One lever was left and right, another was extend/retract, the two buttons were for raising and lowering, and the last lever needed to be unlocked to turn on the engine.

Engine. She suddenly recalled that construction work was far from the quietest sort of labor. It was more the type that prompted posters warning about hearing protection...like the one on the side of the cabin. Earlier she thought it'd be the _motion_ of the crane that'd give their position away, which would involve someone looking in their direction long enough to confirm the motion. But the sheer _volume _the engine produced would draw attention to the crane like moths drawn to a bug zapper. Of course, it was usually the _moths_ that had a problem there, this situation was quite the opposite.

Her half-hearted glance for earplugs had turned up a key instead, of an appropriate size for the keyhole on that engine lever. Saved her from having to fine-tune a hex or hotwire a crane, at least. As for the noise, she decided her ears would be fine for as little as she'd have the crane on. She'd just have to trust that Cyborg knew what he was doing.

* * *

As the sound of an engine roared to life from the crane, Cyborg hoped he knew what he was doing. And that Jinx had abundant mechanical aptitude.

He was sure she was able to figure the thing out with enough time. "Stone" had seen how bright she was when they had classes together at the H.I.V.E. Academy, and the controls weren't _that_ hard. But he had completely forgotten how _loud_ the engine would be, which put time at a premium.

He briefly considered sneaking out of this building while the crane drew everything else off, but decided it wouldn't work. He couldn't communicate with Jinx until she craned him across, and both of them turning around at _that_ point would highlight exactly where they _were_. Not to mention there was no guarantee the kids would stop advancing up this building, and escaping to the street unseen was unlikely to work since the other building would draw crowds on the ground itself.

After quickly evaluating the room for barricade material, he hauled the sofa in front of the door leading into the hallway. And then laid two chairs across the cushions, just in case. If there was ever a time when hurriedly carrying furniture across a room might go unheard, it was when that room was permeated by background noise. On the same note, he'd have a hard time identifying any sounds from the other side of the door, but anyone or anything trying to get _through_ the door would be easily noticed.

It occurred to him that going from "early warning system" to "panic beacon" wasn't exactly an upgrade. But a warning system's worth was directly related to the ability to _respond_, and in light of that going from "no plan" to "half-baked rehashed plan" was a marked improvement. The realization of which caused him to clench his eyebrow in frustration. _Normally_ the Titans would be on their way with a plan for victory by now; tonight was more like a string of narrowly beatable conflicts, where "victory" was defined as "getting into a different narrowly beatable conflict." And even now, the "plan" largely amounted to directing that string of conflicts towards the general direction where victory could be if they get that far, maybe.

He found a new understanding of Jinx's frustration. Half the night they'd been running from defeat, and they still weren't any farther away from it then when they started. And victory wasn't even technically in sight; odds were good that whatever was responsible was at the Tower, but he didn't know how they were going to get there, or what they were going to _do_ when they got there, or even what they were going to _find_.

The sight of a cable entering the view out of the door to the balcony ended Cyborg's brief introspection. Aggravated or not, there was no way they could afford the time to be distracted. As if to reinforce the point, he heard rattling on the nearer door's doorknob, from the direction of the hallway. It quickly turned into pounding as Cyborg walked over to the balcony. His first instinct had been to run; but some part of his brain convinced him not to make his presence known so overtly.

By the time he was outside, the cable was immediately outside the window, dangling gently. He was impressed that Jinx had figured out which door he was in and managed to position the cable so precisely. He imagined anyone who relied on flips as a mode of transportation _must_ have a well-developed sense of spatial awareness, but it was still quite a feat for someone who didn't have integrated rangefinding or inertial positioning systems.

He'd have been happier if the hook had been carrying a pallet or something else he could stand on, though. As it was, he grabbed onto the cable and planted a foot directly on the hook. As he gently adjusted his posture to reduce the chance of his metal foot sliding off the metal hook, the crane started rising higher into the air, carrying him with it. For a brief moment he squealed in alarm; he considered himself fortunate that the background noise from the crane would prevent anyone from _hearing_ that.

After he suppressed his fear of a crushing fall down to street level, he looked in the direction of the building that was his intended direction. The height of the scaffolding explained why the crane was going _up_; he certainly didn't think they were in enough of a hurry to warrant crashing him _through_ it. He looked down to the street next, and wasn't surprised that there were kids milling around down there, not with all the commotion. He didn't really understand why they weren't all approaching the buildings below, though...

He looked _straight_ down, and realized that the street _between_ the two buildings was in fact clear of kids. The lack of obstruction only continued in one direction, from what he could tell; he looked off in that direction...and made out an orange shape approaching at high speed.

The gentle movement of the crane suddenly felt far too slow. "Hurry it up!" he yelled futilely at the crane's control cabin, despite being aware there was no way she'd be able to hear him. Beginning to panic at the prospect of being a sitting duck when the thing arrived, he tried to figure out how _else_ he could communicate with her. She had no communicator, so his equipment couldn't help. He tried pointing at the impending abomination, but she showed no sign of response; since he couldn't make out her shape inside the cabin, it stood to reason that she couldn't identify any motion he made.

He supposed he could try shooting at her...if it would accomplish anything other than getting her attention, and if his sonic cannon _hadn't_ been mauled to the point of needing to be replaced. He still had several of the small rockets in his hidden torso launchers; but trying to explode her and the crane would be a _really_ dumb idea, and they didn't have the kind of range they'd need to hit the gourd at this distance.

Then he smiled. He then fired one of the rockets in the general direction of the monster, having rigged it to explode after two seconds. It didn't even clear the width of the building, but the movement of the crane stopped. A couple seconds later, he saw some sort of motion within the cabin, followed by a pink shape leaning out of the side of the cabin nearest the street. It then disappeared inside the cabin again, and the sound of the crane took on a strained tone as the hook started quickly turning in the direction of his destination, _through_ the intervening scaffolding.

A sudden increase in turbulence drew Cyborg's attention back to the street as he attempted to maintain his footing. The pumpkin had already made its way below, and was presently doing some variant of a spider climb between the buildings, shoving vines through windows to aid its assent. He looked at the scaffolding, back down to the rapidly approaching creature, then back at the scaffolding again. _Still_ too slow for his liking. He resigned himself to jumping, and hoping for the best. The pink blur launching itself out of the cabin indicated Jinx's plan was very similar.

Unfortunately, balancing on a hook complicated the situation. Bending his knees to get the necessary leverage caused the hook to drift in the opposite direction, and his feet slipped off at the sharp angle. He yelled, while he instinctively tightened his grip. A tug on his arm caused him to look up: It wasn't a "tug", so much as his hand stopping where the cable met the base of the hook, and kept the _rest_ of him from falling any further.

He didn't have the chance to feel relieved. The monster hoisted itself to the roof, breaking the arm of the crane as an afterthought. He yelled again as he plummeted through air, then through wood, plastic, metal, and...glass?

It took a moment for him to realize he was neither falling nor pulverized. The crane had managed to make it to the edge of the building, the several layers of scaffolding and a single floor's worth of external wall had halted his descent. Since his legs were _outside_ the window, he reached forward with an arm and pulled himself completely inside the building.

He got back on his feet just in time to see a wide green shape plunge through the ceiling and floor. Followed shortly by a loud crash as the entire gourd crashed through, crushing the far wall and bringing the ceiling down. Cyborg somehow kept his footing despite the pumpkin body landing on the floor only a few feet away. Briefly he thought the thing had failed its attempt to crush him, but then he realized that the body portion was at an angle, its low point where the vine broke the floor. As if it had expected that vine to support its weight. Did it _fall_?

Whatever the reason, it wasn't extricating itself with any degree of speed; and if the monster big enough to replace the entire room with its body wanted to give Cyborg an opening, who was he to refuse? He jumped on top of the gourd, ran up an orange ridge, grabbed the thing's stem with one hand and starting slamming his other fist against the surface.

The monster's shell refused to yield, and the gourd gave no indication of any damage Cyborg might have been doing. It did, however, lift itself off the floor, taking him with it. When the orange body rose to the roof and turned itself on its side, Cyborg took a last swing at it before releasing his grip.

His instinctive response proved itself warranted, as the orange shell swiftly rammed itself through the crane's cabin. Cyborg would've been part of the twisted chunk of debris that remained, had he resisted the thing's attempt to dislodge him. As it was, Cyborg only had to deal with the unhealthy-looking sight of four green vine-tentacles shoved through the bottom of an oversized pumpkin. At least the noise had stopped once the cabin was crushed.

The patch of roof didn't break when he fell on it, and he quickly got to his feet and ran in the opposite direction from the cabin, while the monster lifted itself off the ground again. He ducked behind a stack of wooden beams, and tried thinking up some tactics.

"What are you _doing_?"

Jinx's whispered voice startled him, she certainly wasn't next to him a few seconds ago. "Trying not to fall off the roof," he whispered in response. "What are _you_ doing?"

She sighed. "You _do_ realize it's tall enough to look _over_ the obstruction?"

He blinked. She had a point, those vines were _huge_. But some part of his mind wanted him to take a look at them. He risked a peak over the top. It was certainly _tall_, but it wasn't standing on the "tips" of its vines. Rather, three of the four were laying in a curve against the roof, in shapes reminding Cyborg of snakes.

It was also moving in their general direction, in sort of a careful walk with its tentacles. Before he ran off to the side, he noted that each step ended gently, limiting its speed.

He also recalled how the one vine had plunged through several floors. "It's too heavy!" Cyborg called out to Jinx. "The roof can't support its full force, or all its weight at two points!"

A wave of purple energy appeared in his peripheral vision, and connected with the roof under one of the vines. All _three_ of the vines plunged through the roof, dropping the gourd down a few feet while it awkwardly flailed the air with its free tentacle. "This one can't float like the little guys, if the balancing act is any clue," she commented.

It plunged its free tentacle through the roof. The vibrations underfoot told him to run, and he narrowly avoided being part of the ravine that was created when the entire length of the vine tore through the top of the building, nearly splitting the roof in half. Shortly before the gourd dropped several more feet, leaving its bottom edge at Cyborg's height, and taking the attack vine back below the roof.

"You have any ideas?" Cyborg called out across the crevice as he ran away from the orange body. "Won't be pretty if it tears out a lower floor and we crash down with the rest of the roof.."

"Do you have a dismember mode?"

"You want me to cut _off_ the _vines_?" he asked incredulously as he ducked behind another stack of construction resources. "Don't you have those plant-withering, you know, wave things?"

"The vines are too thick at the base. And I'm not picky about the method; don't you have those explosive, you know, _rockets_?"

"I only have a few left, and they won't do much if they can't penetrate the vines." Normally there was no need to devote any of his limited missile capacity to armor-piercing warheads, since his sonic cannon could weaken and vaporize armor using his ample energy supply.

"So, you need me to make some weak points?"

"...yeah, and then I'll hit them for massive damage." _So this is a boss fight, then_, he thought to himself. _Wonder how deep into video-game parody we'll go..._

The pumpkin had extricated itself from the roof just in time for a series of hexes to strike the side of the vine closest to Cyborg. It walked off in that direction, swinging another vine through the air to disperse the stream of energy. And possibly trying to hit Jinx too, he couldn't see where she was.

Opening the slots on either side of his torso that covered his rocket launchers was the easy part, it was finding the target area that would be hard. The _other_ pumpkins had gained brown splotches where Jinx's attacks had connected, but he couldn't see any withered areas on _this_ one. If she couldn't dent it at _all_...

Still, Cyborg was well aware of how easy _and_ dangerous it was to underestimate Jinx. "You alright over there?" he yelled amidst the purple flashes, "I can't see your weak point."

A crash accompanied the creature's attempt to flatten Jinx against the roof. The vibration had almost subsided when she finally responded. "_Maybe_ you should be looking for _its_ 'weak point'," she said patronizingly, her voice shifting from Cyborg's left to his right as she jumped several feet over his head.

Cyborg didn't have time to process the insinuation. He jumped to his left, to avoid the oversized vine that was coming down diagonally near his spot. He was certain that the force of impact would've knocked him over, if he hadn't been airborne at the time. As he landed, though, he saw it: the creature had adjusted its own "footing" to keep going after Jinx, and the new angle revealed the brown spot that Jinx had been working on, near the base of the orange section of its body.

He wasted no time in firing a salvo of four rockets at the spot. The creature noticed the attack and attempted to whip it's loose vine at the rockets, but the sudden movement put too much pressure on its other vines and it fell about two floors in height, thwarting the defensive movement. Meanwhile, the rockets' guidance systems kept on target, flying low against the roof and turning sharply upward into the damaged vine.

The first rocket exploded shortly after breaking through the cracked "skin" of the vine. A horrible high-pitched squeal filled the air as the vine fell from the rest of the creature. The second rocket hit the base of the vine, producing another squeal along with a small spray of bright red fluid. Cracks appeared on the shell of the orange gourd. The third rocket entered the thing's body, exploding at the _top _of the shell. Orange fragments sprayed out the top and the side, and more of the red fluid splashed out the hole at the bottom.

The fourth rocket turned out to have been unnecessary; it traveled through the pumpkin entirely, and exploded harmlessly in the air as the abomination's body fell lifelessly to the roof. On impact, the cracked shell split open, oozing copious quantities of that disgusting bloody pumpkin pulp.

A wide purple wave of energy hit the edge of the roof, obliterating the edge and dropping the attached section of roof into a downward slope. "I'm not swimming in _that_," Jinx declared, as the goo followed the path she had made to a room on the floor below. She stared at the hole for a second, then tossed another hex, shattering the wall separating the room from the outside of the building. "Which means we don't want it _backflowing_."

Cyborg, meanwhile, had a difficult time reconciling the light feeling in his chest with the burning feeling in his nose. "You know, this victory would feel a lot more..._victorious,_ if it weren't so _disgusting_."

"No shit," Jinx responded with a shake of her head. "At least we know these things are a _lot_ easier to take down when we aren't fighting on _their_ terms."

"Yeah, that'll make reclaiming the Tower a _lot_ easier."

"What do you have in mind?"

"You've seen the obstacle course, the one with the automated targeting systems. It can pull double duty as a security installation." Cyborg briefly tried to remember if he'd mentioned that upgrade to any of the other Titans, before deciding this wasn't the time to worry about it. "I just gotta connect directly to the Tower's security system to activate it. So we just gotta get there."

"Right, so let's _get_ there, before something else gets _here_. The stairs down to the basement should be right over...huh."

Cyborg walked over to where she was looking. One of the now-dispatched pumpkin's vine attacks had split open the roof over what was indeed a stairwell. The roof was unlikely to win any contests, but Cyborg didn't see any damage to the stairs themselves. Of course, he couldn't see past the few floors at the top, either.

"Well that's a little too convenient, isn't it?" he commented.

"Yeah. Wish we had a choice...you have any better ideas?" she asked.

He thought for a moment. "Better? No."

"Then let's see how deep this rabbit hole goes."

Cyborg used his shoulder lamp to provide lighting as the two of them slowly descended towards the basement level, and the hidden exit Jinx said was there. The rumbling from the wind blowing across the roof grew slowly quieter as they went deeper, turning into an eerie whistling noise as the solid walls of the stairwell mimicked the effect of a wind tunnel. He wasn't particularly unnerved by it, though. Titans Tower wasn't exactly a short building itself, and those kinds of noises were normal with any significant air movement.

His own footfalls and the intermittent creaks of the stairs were a different matter, though. Every noise the stair made brought to mind the possibility of the staircase collapsing under his weight, much as the roof had with their plant assailant. While falling down to ground level might save some _time_, he didn't recall a time this evening when it would be beneficial. And though he saw no evidence of damage to the stairs, nor the _side_ of the staircase, nor the _under_side of the staircase; the noise was clearly present, and enough to keep him from trying to move any faster than walking pace.

If Jinx had any problem with his self-imposed pace, she gave no sign of it. She silently kept a few steps ahead of him, glancing over her shoulder at each creak loud enough for her to hear. He still found it odd that he could only hear _his_ footsteps; he could clearly see that the two of them weren't walking in sync, yet he could never identify a sound that indicated her boots touching the wooden surface of the stairs.

Wordlessly descending down a spiraling stairway in the dark reminded Cyborg quite strongly of the stair chamber in the Scath-related structure below the city, around the time they'd all learned about Raven's heritage. This place was square instead of circular though, and about half the width. It also had a lack of malevolent ghosts assaulting them on the way down, a difference Cyborg approved of wholeheartedly.

They reached the bottom floor, which was technically one floor _below _ground level, without any actual incident. Cyborg was quietly relieved to feel the solid flooring under his feet as he quickly caught up with Jinx, who was waiting at a door for the basement proper.

"OK," she said in a soft tone as she gently opened the door. "It's not far from...huh."

He saw her staring through the now open doorway, and took a look himself. Most of the overhead lights were still working, probably because of the space and ground between here and all the action on the roof. The room, which could stretch the entire width of the floor for all he knew, was a sea of cubicle walls, with a couple of rolling file cabinet islands he could see down the aisle. It looked more like a Dilbert cartoon than a basement, although he supposed it could be a basement _in_ a Dilbert cartoon.

Didn't take long for him to put the pieces together. "So they rearranged the basement before they went to the trouble of adding to the roof."

"This was all clear space the last time I was here," she commented with some confusion. She then shook her head quickly and sighed. "Well it's not like they could _move_ the passage the trapdoor connects to, it has to be in the same place. Let's go." And with that she walked down the aisle with a deliberate pace. Cyborg followed behind her, assuming she was determining the walking distances from memory.

She made a left turn, then a right turn, continued forward a ways...then stopped in front of a cubicle wall. After a couple seconds she shrugged, and casually tossed a hex at it; over the course of a couple seconds, the barrier cracked and collapsed into a pile of tiny pieces on the floor, with the fuzzy material of its covering more-or-less dissolving into thin air.

They were then faced with a large cubicle enclosure. A ring of counters, interrupted by two copy machines, held three computer printers. The space under the counters was filled with file cabinets and other types of office storage containers.

"Naturally," Jinx said sarcastically, "the _perfect_ place for a copy center is _on top_ of a _trapdoor_." She sighed, loudly.

"Don't suppose we could just level what's on top of it," Cyborg commented.

Jinx took a deep breath. "No. Aside from not knowing exactly where it is, we're more likely to bury it, or warp it so much that it won't open. Guess we'll just have to do this the old fashioned way."

A patch of ceiling above them crumbled and broke, as what used to be a printer was shoved through it. Both of them saw it and dodged out of the way; Cyborg jumped back while Jinx rolled forward. Four kids, all in bunny costumes, fell through the floor, but managed to remain standing.

"Cyborg," they all intoned in unison, before two started walking towards Cyborg and the others progressed towards Jinx.

"Quick!" Jinx yelled as she back-flipped to land on top of one of the copy machines. "What was your _not_-better idea? Short version!"

"Build something on the roof!" he answered in kind. He backed up a step, as the sound of other ceiling breakages echoed around him.

"OK," she declared as she looked over the edge of the cubicles from her current height, "That's the new plan, take out the stairs behind you, I'll catch up!"

Cyborg was taken aback. "How are you going to 'catch up' if I take out the _stairs_?" he asked incredulously.

She growled. "Nothing matters if we can't get to the Tower to stop all these things, I'll keep them busy. _We don't have time to discuss this in committee!_"

He growled himself, as he obediently turned around and ran for the stairs. "**I am not a committee**! But fine, _you _worry about the fighters and _I'll_ worry about the Tower!"

Cyborg thought maybe he should have mentioned that he didn't actually know _what_ he was going to build yet. But, like the woman said, no time to discuss it in committee.


	16. Chapter 16

Jinx vaulted over the cubicle wall the moment Cyborg turned to make his departure. Not how she _usually_ dealt with flimsy obstructions in her way, but it was more use to her intact.

Cyborg, being much taller than the typical office worker, was very easy to see over the edge of the cubicle walls. She followed in his general direction from a parallel path, as sounds of the ceiling being punctured rang out sporadically around her. A pair of witches—or rather, two unreasonable facsimiles, complete with stereotyped conical hats—hopped through a new hole in the ceiling in front of her, prompting Jinx to make a left turn.

As she continued down this new path, she heard that monotone "Cyborg" in a few different voices on her left. She saw Cyborg charge between cubicle dividers a short distance in front of her, shortly before he opened the door they had both entered through. She stopped running, while a trio of small skeleton costumes tried to shamble quickly between the same dividers in a futile attempt to catch their declared target.

Right after Cyborg closed the door, she raised an arm overhead, above the height of the cubicle walls, and flung a hex at the door. The effect was nearly unnoticeable on this side of the door, but distorting the hinges on the other side would buy Cyborg a few seconds if the kids tried to open it conventionally.

As it turned out, Cyborg didn't need much more than a _couple_ seconds. She instinctively winced at the cacophony from the stairwell, the ground under her feet resonating with the noise. Whatever he'd done, the door was probably no longer an egress point.

The zombie kids appeared to agree, as after a couple seconds they began wordlessly shambling towards _her_.

Jinx scoffed. "What, I'm not _important_ enough for you to use _my_ name? Friggin' stuck-up bear bastards."

She jumped off to the side at the sound of the ceiling over her head being torn apart. She was fairly sure the twelve-year-old sized Winnie the Pooh that landed feet-first on the floor wasn't _intended_ to be a direct rebuttal, but it hardly mattered. The new hole in the ceiling was quite a bit larger than the kid that came through it.

With a couple quick steps towards the opening and a nearly vertical leap, she left the basement entirely and landed on the first floor.

Or rather, crashed _into_ something on the first floor.

Her instinctive attempt to roll off of whatever she'd landed on was halted by a small hand clenching down on her leg. She looked behind her to see where the offending entity was, and by the time she'd identified the costume as Piglet she'd already stretched her other leg forward and then slammed the heel of her boot into the kid's face.

The kid released his grip. As Jinxed finished rolling away and standing, she wondered if that degree of force was excessive; but the kid was already halfway off the floor by the time she was fully standing. More importantly, a quick look around revealed kids and blue-glowing eyes scattered in every direction as far as she could see across the lobby, in small clusters around whatever large object was handy.

Picking the direction that seemed safest, she sprinted ahead at full speed. Her acceleration proved too much for the kids to handle, and she got out of the wide-open space of the lobby and into a hallway at the back easily enough. She paused briefly to catch her breath, and to rub the sore spot on her leg.

She silently rolled her eyes. First the metal scratching her arm, _then_ the first bear briefly messing up her legs, _then_ her _hair_, and _now_ her leg _again_? She was about to mentally protest at all the physical punishment, when she remembered that Cyborg's arm had been punctured at the elbow and torn _open_ down to the wrist. Maybe what happened to her arm and leg wasn't so bad.

A flicker of motion in her peripheral vision down the hall turned out to be a rolling chair being hurled through the air in her general direction, drawing her attention back to the present. She shoved herself against the wall, reaching the other side of the hall in time to avoid a horribly improper sitting technique.

Her first instinct was to turn around and head back into the lobby, but she quickly stopped herself. The lobby had more than its fair share of chairs, and she preferred not be hit by _those_ either. At the other end of the hall was a set of three zombie kids, newly chairless. Charging past them seemed questionable at best; the _single_ kid that had grabbed her in the lobby was enough to slow her down, and she didn't have enough legs to kick all three of them in the face at once.

Which left her with a vertical approach. The ceiling was too low to try jumping over them...But that meant the ceiling was in easy reach. Rolling her eyes as the trio stumbled in her direction, she tossed a hex at the ceiling in front of her. Obediently, three lines of a rectangle on the ceiling exploded with purple light. The connected piece of ceiling remained attached on the fourth side of the shape, so when it touched the floor it was effectively a ramp up to the second floor.

Not wasting a moment, she quickly sprinted up the opening. When she felt the surface buckle after her first step, she smoothly bent her knee forward to turn the sprint into a leap. The slab's tenuous connection to the ceiling broke as she pushed herself through the air and opening. By the time the chunk of ceiling hit the first floor with a thud, she had planted her hands against the _second_ floor to turn her momentum into a tight roll; and she resumed her sprint with no interrupting motion once her feet touched the ground.

With no kids in sight, she hurriedly changed course towards the back of the lobby. She'd been an unwelcome "guest" in this building before, and the wide staircase that connected the six floors overlooking the lobby was there. Since its primary purpose was to _show off_ the lobby to visitors, as far as she could tell, it didn't connect to the basement and was unlikely to be closed off. More questionable was whether the pounding the building had taken on the roof would damage it.

As it turned out, the staircase was intact. At least, until Jinx hexed the set of stairs connecting to the first floor as she made her way up. The landings showed off the lobby, which meant all those kids in the lobby would see her. No sense leaving them a way to follow her up.

She thought it odd that she hadn't seen any kids around the landing on the second floor, since the staircase _was_ intact and that fight with the pumpkin happened on the roof. The landing around the third floor was also devoid of movement. As was the fourth floor.

She was positively suspicious when the fifth floor's landing was also clear, but stopping to figure out _why_ seemed to be inviting trouble for no advantage, so she pressed on.

A small hand grabbed her leg midstep as she stepped onto the sixth floor.

Jinx had barely enough time to halt her fast pace to stay standing, before two kids from the opposite direction shambled into her, knocking her face-first onto the ground anyway.

She winced as the hand on her leg tightened into a nearly-crushing grip and tried to pull her back...or pull _itself_ forward, if the feel of the other small bodies climbing up her back was any indication.

She couldn't distinguish between the three kids by tactile sensation alone; but whatever they had planned, she doubted was wholesome in at _least_ one sense of the word. So she did what any sane person would do when trapped with no way out, and _made_ a way out.

Jinx covered her face with one arm, and hexed the floor with her other hand.

She shivered as her own power coursed so close to her own skin, and heard the entirety of the floor beneath her crackling and creaking. Right before gravity plunged her through the thoroughly weakened material.

The kids hadn't prepared for the move, and fell off her back when she crashed on the floor below. The uncarpeted floor was far from gentle, but Jinx had felt worse distress in her muscles before, from much higher velocity impacts. She wasted no time pushing herself onto her feet and running up the stairs once more, before the kids had a chance to grab her again. An idle corner of her mind wanted to see Raven pick herself up off the ground so quickly after landing flat on _her_ chest.

Her running steps slowed to a stop. Since she'd been tackled coming off the stairs, the top of the stairs was now a cloud of dust that she'd just escaped from. She was fairly sure the floor around the gap would survive her jumping on it, but she couldn't see if there were any _more_ kids waiting for her up there.

She shook her head and swiped her arm towards the wall to the right of the staircase, sending a large hex at it. It plunged through the material and out the other wall forming the corner. Both walls crumbled into drywall fragments and particles, leaving the corner itself intact; Jinx didn't want to test the stability of the building by removing an obvious location for a support beam, she'd had enough buildings crashing down on her head tonight to last for _nine_ lives.

Most of the debris cloud stayed low to the ground, and Jinx started sprinting through the empty-looking path she'd just made. A Frankenstein look-alike, this kid being around her age instead of half of it like most of them, stepped through the opening at the farther wall and swung an arm back.

Jinx broke her sprint by raising her leg to plant a boot on the kid's chest, then pushing off him with all her might. The kid stumbled backwards and fell on his back, his arm swiping only at empty air, while she executed an elegant backflip to land on her feet only a couple feet behind her.

Or at least that was her intent. She almost squeaked as her boot failed to fully connect with the ground, and she tipped over backwards; her instincts took over, and she bent her knees and planted her hands to land in an ungainly sitting position instead of sprawled like her opponent. She winced from the impact, briefly closing her eyes...before feeling her eyelids close tightly and her eyes roll towards the top of her head.

With a snarl, she forced her eyes open and pushed herself off the ground and onto her feet. _"I DID __**NOT**__ JUST FALL ON MY BUTT BECAUSE I'M TIRED!" _she declared to no one in particular, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

She charged through the hole and past her adversary, who was thankfully still on the ground. The brief tug she felt on her dress as she slipped past did remind her of how critical time was. She decided holding the kids off was a losing battle, and heading to the roof as soon as possible was now her goal.

Jinx ran down hallway after hallway, looking for a vertical exit. She briefly considered descending to the streets out one of the many exterior windows, but it was swarming with kids when she'd last seen it. Kids that had just proven capable of taking her down with force of numbers. Landing in the _middle_ of that many of them would be suicidal. Hexing the ceiling to jump up remained an option, but the risk of destabilizing the building was pretty high, and would only increase as she ascended.

A sign indicating an elevator caught her attention, and she stopped in front of the two sliding metal doors. While the odds were good that the elevator would lead upwards, all the mayhem on the roof was likely to have mangled the shaft somewhere, assuming the elevator was even running. And the thought of shimmying up several floors of cable was threatening to bring another fatigue episode.

Then she noticed the nearby stairwell access. In all likelihood it was the same stairwell she and Cyborg had descended in, and thus the same one he was supposed to render unusable; but the odds of him having destroyed so many floors of stairs was slim. In any case, it wouldn't hurt to check...

Suspecting she just jinxed something _again_, Jinx sighed and tossed a hex at the door, reducing it to a pile of rubble on the floor. It wasn't like an object _intended_ to move could be load-bearing, and it'd be harder for kids to hide behind dirty air than a solid door. After checking either side of the door for threats, she stepped into the stairwell.

Looking down over the edge, she saw Cyborg did a reasonably thorough job; if she'd tried this a couple floors below, there would have been no landing to speak of. Looking up revealed a chaotic mass of stair-shaped metal a few floors up, as though a few floors' worth of stairs had been removed from the wall and formed into a barricade. Many of the sections still had the wood covers of their steps intact, making intentional removal far more likely than general collapse.

She began walking up the remaining flights of stairs, being alert for signs of the steps giving way to gravity. The barrier being made of the stairs likely meant there were no more stairs _beyond_ it to climb, but four floors by stair was still less effort than even a single floor by climbing a cable, even after accounting for the slight risk of the floor falling out from under her.

Other than needing to duck to get past a corner where the barricade was resting on the still-intact landing, the journey up three floors was silent and uneventful. She figured the lack of wind noises meant Cyborg had sealed the roof access as well, but other than a testament to his thoroughness it hardly mattered.

Emerging onto the tenth floor, her first course of action was to seal the door, by using a hex to distort its hinges the same way she had this door's cousin on the basement floor. If she could get up here without any fancy movement, so could any number of kids; stalling them at the door seemed prudent.

The next thing she noticed was a mess on the floor of the hallway she'd entered onto, including a shattered pot with dirt and the remains of a plant strewn off to her right. She looked down the hall to her left, where whatever propelling force must have come from...and saw a huge hole in the ceiling and floor, wider than the hallway itself.

Walking over to the edge of the hole and looking upwards, she saw...the night sky, complete with stars, past a few other examples of punctured ceilings and floors. The aftereffects of the giant pumpkin's vines plunging through the building, she imagined. In any case, she had found her way up and out.

Jumping back and forth across and through holes, ascending a floor each time, was simple enough; and in less than half a minute Jinx was standing on the roof. In time to see Cyborg fiddling with some wreckage from what used to be the crane's control cabin, affixing it to some kind of sled shape hanging from a wide triangle frame filled with a sheet of plastic...

"...A _hang_ glider?" she asked incredulously as she approached him.

He turned around at the sound of her voice. "You made it, thank goodness!" he proclaimed. "Yeah, it's a glider."

Ignoring how that could possibly be the first time anyone ever thanked _goodness_ for _her_ presence, she countered, "Built out of wooden beams and tarps? This _thing _is supposed to get us to the _Tower_?"

"I'm sure it can get to the Tower from here, yeah. Pretty sure."

"_Pretty_ sure?!"

"Hey, I didn't decide 'creepy stairs' was better for nothing. But that fell through, literally even, and here we are."

Jinx _wanted_ to object, but she found she couldn't. They were low on options, and at least this _mockery_ of a plan actually had the Tower as its endpoint; they'd still have had to find a way to the Tower if her basement escape plan had worked correctly. She let out a long sigh. "Is this thing even airworthy?"

"Sure is, just finished testing it across the rooftop. I was touching up the pilot harnesses when you showed up."

"OK, that's something. Wait, harness_es_?" she asked, emphasizing the plural portion of the word. She looked at the sled shaped portion again, and now that she was closer she could make out that there were actually _two_ such shapes, suspended over each other; each with a metal bar in front of it connected into the wooden frame. "You're not expecting...I've never flown a glider before, hang or otherwise!"

"Well, _technically_ neither have I; but the physics are pretty basic, and I whipped up a sort of power steering for us. Won't take both of us to pilot it, but I want to keep our options open in case things start going _right_ for a change."

She suspected that was supposed to reassure her. If so, it did a poor job. "What _kind_ of options?" she asked skeptically. She was seeing mental images of crashing into the water because she couldn't pilot the thing, and the fleet of waterborne pumpkins floating by to finish whatever the impact didn't break. Whatever Cyborg had in mind, it'd have to be pretty good to justify _that_ risk.

"Once we get close enough to the Tower, I should be able to break through the jamming effect and connect to Tower security. If it happens while we're in flight, I should be able to stack the deck in our favor...but I can't work the flight controls and the buttons on my remote comm at the same time."

That _would_ qualify as pretty good, much to Jinx's chagrin; she was still hoping to get out of the responsibility. But before she had time to come up with a counterpoint, a rumble dancing at the edge of her hearing drew her attention. A rumble that sounded all too familiar by now.

Wordlessly, she turned to the side and ran towards the edge of the roof, in the opposite direction from the Tower. Sure enough, the tiny orange dot she saw in the distance was coming closer.

"Looks like we're gonna have a vegetable visitor in a couple minutes," she yelled over her shoulder.

"_Another_ one?" Cyborg replied. "How many overgrown gourds do these things _have_?"

She shook her head and walked back to the collection of scrap that had dreams of being a hang glider one day. "All I know, is I'm glad they're so impatient. We always hear the giant ones before we see them; if they tried sneaking up on us we'd be screwed." Which was about how she felt _now_; there was no longer time to talk Cyborg out of _anything_. And if his contraption didn't work, well, she'd find out _really_ soon.

"And letting them catch us now would really suck, so _get in_!" Cyborg said.

"Get in _what?_" she countered.

"Just climb into the top harness thing, strap in and lay down; I gotta provide the foot power to launch the thing."

Oh right, hang gliders aren't always flown from a seated position. She forcefully blinked a couple times as she complied, hoping to keep fatigue from interfering with her thought process any further, at least long enough to get to the Tower and let her adrenaline response keep her going the rest of the way.

She was fairly sure the sled shaped portion she was now laying on wasn't a typical part of a harness, but she could only be concerned about it keeping her from falling to the bay.. It certainly felt sturdy enough as she fastened the straps holding her into place. She realized that if the other harness was expected to support _Cyborg's_ weight, it'd have absolutely no problem with her wispy-by-comparison mass.

"You ready?" Cyborg asked from behind her.

"As ready as I'm going to get," she answered dismissively. "So you know, I'm going to _haunt_ you if I die in this thing."

"Fair enough," Cyborg answered without missing a beat. "Now _hold on_!"

Jinx grabbed the edge of the solid shape she was laying on, just in case Cyborg wasn't being figurative, as she felt herself and the whole assembly rise a few feet into the air. The craft starting moving forward, lacking in smoothness since Cyborg's running steps reverberated through the frame, the harness and Jinx's body. She spent the next few seconds trying to come up with an escape plan in case the glider didn't make it all the way to the Tower.

"_Yabba dabba doo_!" Cyborg exclaimed as the glider went over the edge of the roof and starting tipping towards the ground. Jinx's alarm at the loss of altitude was briefly halted by his quoting of a television show that was at least _twice_ as old as the two of them were.

The glider soon began pointing skywards. "You alright up there?" Cyborg yelled from below, over the low sound of air rushing by.

"Yes, Mr. Flintstone," she answered sarcastically.

He paused for a couple seconds. "OK, since you have the control bar in front of you, I'll tell you how to work it. Grab it on both sides, push up for up, down for down, and turn it for turning left or right. Don't need to worry about it yet; I still got it."

Jinx noticed the glider had tipped down and back up again while he was explaining. "Why aren't we flying level?"

"Oh, that. Well, we point down for gravity to give us speed for altitude, and then back up to get altitude for speed. The improvised construction here is...a little inefficient, but we should still reach the Tower before we run out of altitude and hit the water."

_Should_? "You're not filling me with a whole lot of confidence here."

"Just relax, we'll be fine."

Looking around, seeing the city shrink and the Tower slowly grow in the skyline, she found it difficult to relax. Perhaps if her "sled" didn't block her view below, and she could see the surface of the water below to tell how high they were, it'd be different. Or it might make her _more_ anxious than not knowing. She wasn't sure.

"OK," Cyborg called out, "I think I'm close enough to get a signal to the Tower. You got the control bar?"

She took a deep breath and grabbed the wide piece of metal at both ends. "I guess," she commented, trying to hide her apprehension.

"If we start falling, just let it fall for a bit then push it back up," he added. "You'll do fine."

She wasn't entirely sure _how _they'd start falling, until the sound of the air rushing by her ears got softer for just a moment. Followed shortly by the glider's nose leaning towards the water.

Feeling her heart jump into her throat, she swallowed to force it back into her throat, and forced herself to wait. When it was at the same angle as she'd seen Cyborg correct at, she braced her elbows and pushed up against the control bar.

Obediently, if a little sluggishly, the glider's nose lifted. Once the glider was pointing at the sky again, she took a deep breath. _OK_, she told herself, _you can do this._

"There ya go!" Cyborg commented. "Was that so bad?"

She wanted to yell at him for patronizing her so calmly, but decided otherwise. "Have anything _useful_ to tell me?" she demanded instead.

"Yeah, I got the controls again, but you can hold on if you want."

She decided to. "About the _Tower_."

"The system in Ops was thrashed, so no telling what's in there. Nothing moving in the rest of the Tower. Managed to tweak the security system a bit, though. They'll ignore the two of us, so no one will know we're there when we go in."

She waited for him to continue. "What about the _pumpkins_ and the obstacle course, the one you said could _shoot_ at them?"

"For the course thing I need to directly connect to get it started. Physically-plugging-in, direct. Everything should be ready for it, though. And it looks like there's three gigantic pumpkins there. One of them's even bigger than the other giant ones we've seen; I'd say it's 'titanic' but that'd get confusing. But they're all just laying there, on the ground. Not seeing any vines or anything. With any luck—"

She doubted Cyborg could notice the glare she was giving his general direction through the harness thing, but darn it she was _trying_ anyway.

"I just..._you_-ed it, didn't I?" he added meekly

"Shut up," she growled.

Jinx heard him sigh, which was an impressive feat with a piece of wood and the rush of air in the way. "I'd love to, but we've got a problem."

"Of _course_ we have a problem," she added with sarcastic surprise, "Why should this be any different than the _rest_ of the night?"

"I miscalculated. We don't have enough altitude left to get us to the Tower."

Her heart tried to jump up her throat again. "_WHAT?_"

"I underestimated the—"

"_I DON'T CARE _**WHY**_! _I'm **still** haunting you if those green pumpkins from the sewer kill us because we had to crash!"

"...I didn't say _you_."

That made no...wait. Not us, not her..."And what are _you_ going to be doing?"

"Hoping those things don't rest on the sea floor for a reason."

She was unprepared for that kind of response. "You're leaving me _again_, you _bastard_." she blurted out.

He paused for a couple seconds. "Look, I have an oxygenator installed so I won't need to breathe, I can walk along the bottom long enough to get to the bay for the T-Sub. There's a communication console in there, use it to contact me."

"How—"

"_We don't have time!_ I'm going to make the glider dive _hard_. I'll need you to pull up, 'cause I'm dropping off when the thing's level. The lowered height with the same speed'll get you to the Tower. I'll tell you when to start."

When he said they didn't have time, it was because he started the dive immediately. Jinx swallowed, and blinked away the tears threatening to form in her eyes. There were far too many memories poking at her sleep-deprived composure to focus on any of them, regardless of whether or not the tears were a result of the sheer force of air flying in her eyes.

"_NOW!_" he called.

With a snarl, she forced the control bar up, and the horizon began to level out. Right past the level point she heard a splash a far distance behind her, and she was on her own. Again.

It was only a few seconds before she identified some of the sewer pumpkins in the water, as she drew quickly close to the Tower. But what got her attention were the two _orange_ pumpkins, stepping out from behind the Tower and approaching the coast.

She tried to think what she could do. She couldn't fight _one_ of those by herself, she couldn't sneak if they saw her landing...And of course Cyborg forgot to tell her _how_ to land, even if it were an option.

The Tower was approaching fast, so she didn't have time to question the spur-of-the-moment thought that just came to her. She turned the glider gently to the right, aiming for one of the pumpkins. She then shifted her grip just long enough to hex the "sled" under her. She shuddered, still highly discomforted to be so close to the target of her own hexes, but it worked as intended: Her feet landed on Cyborg's sled, and the straps around her were disintegrated. And the ungainly standing posture did let her see the ground below.

She made a precise drop off the glider, landing behind an outcropping near the beach to keep the orange pumpkins from seeing her dismount. Hoping the green pumpkins didn't have the kind of visual acuity they'd need to spot where she landed, she darted off to the side as quietly as she could, keeping the island itself between her and the larger pumpkins.

A few seconds later, as she made her best attempt to move unnoticed across the ground towards the Tower; she heard a loud crunch, intermingled with the sound of splintering wood. She mentally dedicated a moment of silence to Cyborg's contraption. It finally achieved its dream of being a glider, only to expire minutes later.

At the harsh rock edge, Jinx shook her head and jumped up to the next relatively level spot on her way towards the Tower. The gently sloping main path for the Tower started from the _opposite_ end of the island, back here the landscape was still in its natural state for the most part. Its natural, steep, rocky state. That _did _mean the horizontal distance she had to travel was much less, but it also meant she'd have to travel vertically, and every second in the air was a second she could be spotted by all the putrid plants placed out in the bay.

But there was nothing else she could do. Whether or not the water-based pumpkins could actually _see_ far from their native water, the large _orange_ pumpkin on the roof had proven quite capable of spotting her; and if either of its cousins _here_ saw her she'd be in as many pieces as the glider. That the Tower hadn't been knocked over meant they needed to keep it around for _something_, so it should be safe. And even if that wasn't the case, the island was far too small for her to hide_ outside_ for any length of time.

Jinx took a deep breath, resolved to ignore her fear of being found, and started jumping from level spot to level spot, heading for the Tower interior as quickly as possible.

When she heard the sound of oversized vines hitting the ground, and without any way to tell if they were looking _for_ her or charging _at_ her...She insisted to herself that her frantic pulse was a nice change of pace from her heart trying to squeeze where it didn't belong.


End file.
